Car powered by Diet Coke, Mentos travels 239 feet.

BUCKFIELD, Maine — The Maine guys known for creating colorful geysers from Diet Coke and Mentos candies say they’ve set a distance record for a vehicle with soda-and-candy-powered propulsion.

Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz created a single-seat rocket car powered by 54 bottles of Coke Zero and 324 Mentos. They say the Mark II traveled 239 feet, improving upon last year’s 220 feet with only half the fuel. They posted video of a 209-foot attempt online.

Voltz said Thursday they incorporated a simple piston-and-cylinder mechanism to get the vehicle moving. He says it’s powerful enough that people shouldn’t try the experiment at home.

The Buckfield-based entertainers shot to fame five years ago when they wore lab coats and goggles during their online videos demonstrating elaborate geysers set to music.

PASADENA, Calif. (KTLA) — There are 18 new planets in the universe — and they’re all orbiting around stars larger than the sun.

The discovery of confirmed planets was made by a team of Caltech astronomers and was published in the December issue of the astronomy journal, The Astrophysical Journal Supplement, the university announced Friday.

The astronomers worked out of the Keck Observatory in Hawaii with follow-up observations at facilities in Texas and Arizona. The find is especially significant because it’s the first to be made from Earth.

“It’s the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler (orbital) mission,” says John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and leader of the project.

The team focused on “retired” A-type stars, which are one and a half times larger than the sun and just past the main stage of their life.

The 18 “Jupiter-like” were found in the gravitational pull of these large stars.

According to Johnson, the find increases the number of known planets by 50% and provides a new understanding of how planets, and our own solar system, might form.

But because these planets have such wide orbits, the findings take several years to become apparent. Johnson says he started the research as a graduate student at the university.

“I liken it to a garden—you plant the seeds and put a lot of work into it,” he said. “Then, a decade in, your garden is big and flourishing. That’s where I am right now. My garden is full of these big, bright, juicy tomatoes—these Jupiter-sized planets.”

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Strategic Communication Theory

By Msc, Msd, Bsc Cristian Guerrero Castro.

The professionals from various fields are working on what they call Strategic Communication, which has generated a number of people who speak about “their science”, express their observations and dictate norms that are trying to establish something like a structure in a non-existent science.

I say “non-existent science” because it has not been established as such, having neither a definite conceptualization, nor a current or a systematic and unified lineament.

There are several disciplines that claim the Strategic Communication, such as public relations, journalism, visual communication, advertising, marketing and others. Therefore clarifying questions arise, such as: which discipline does strategic communication belong to? Or: Can every discipline communicate strategically? Now my question is: how can a discipline confirm to communicate strategically without knowledge about strategy?

If we analyze the diverse theories of communication, we can mention the theory of mass communication by Harold Dwight Lasswell that defines it as “structure and function”, which means communication is the supervision or surveillance of the environment, the correlation of different parts of the society responding to the environment that leads to communicate.

We could name many communication theorists, such as David Berlo who analyzed the objective of mass communication by emphasizing the simplest: “So that there is communication between the sender and the receptor, they must speak the same language and understand the same signs in order to make the process of communication perfect”, or perhaps renowned theorists who contributed significantly to the science of communication like Gerhard Maletzke, Warren Weaver, among many others.

Herewith we clarify that the communication is established as a science, since it has theories and scientific lineaments. But what happened with the strategy? In this point the “autopoiesis”(MATURANA) or unification of communication and strategy does not get established for those who do not understand the “logic of action” of strategy. However, later I will prove that the strategy is both a science and art.

So, what are the theories of strategy? What are its main theorists? What are the methods of strategy? How does the strategy work? Or a very simple question like: what is strategy? Questions that paralyze all the alleged “experts” of the so-called “strategic communication” that we see nowadays with innocent and illusory publications on something they do not have an accurate knowledge about and have not analyzed thoroughly. Knowledge of the communication theories yes, but no knowledge of the theory of strategy and its implementation.

Strategic Communication today, as we have already stated, is a mixture of diverse activities, each of which has to a higher or lower degree structured its procedures of analysis, evaluation and control, a situation that is not defined in the real scenario of strategic communication.

This methodology, that we are missing, must contain the vital objectives of the entity, which are the basis of the strategic process in its three dimensions (strategic, operational and tactical).

This methodology must also include a structured analysis of the factors of the scenario with the pertinent qualitative and quantitative instruments of analysis, considering the characteristics of the scenario, the origin of the conflict, the odds, measures, percentages, courses of action, the direct and indirect actors, the intervening factors in every stage of the scenario, and the behavior of the actors in the past, present and future.

The lack of a methodology to define the strategic communication has as result that in practice each entity, company, institution or organization develops these activities according to how it is interpreted by who is in charge of this area. That results in wrong, incomplete or definitely inapplicable communication management.

Without a precise knowledge of the theories of the strategy as a tool, method, discipline and as science, those don’t unify. This leads to one of the previously indicated problems where many people from different disciplines irresponsibly call strategic communication what they consider “communicating strategically”, backed by their experiences, cases, or sometimes by their “enlightened gift of smell”

They confuse social communication with strategic communication.

This is highly important because without a structured methodology where the sciences communication and strategy work, we fail to develop strategic communication, we only communicate, because strategy is the science of conceiving, activating, deciding, planning, executing, using and guiding the media at a particular time, place and space to achieve and / or maintain the set goals in a particular scenario.

This theory, based on a thorough 5-year research proposes a methodology for defining communication strategies, considering that the strategy is the nucleus and the motor driving the communication whit an integration of Mass communication and Strategy sciences.

In conclusion;

S+A = (S-rf + C.rf) = S= (S*) + M+C= (Sig1, chn, cod, sn, sig2) = C = (C*)

+ [Mng] £ S.C

“Without strategy we can only communicate. Only with strategy we can communicate strategically.” © Cristian Guerrero-Castro. 2011.

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Creating Cloud Formations in the Battlespace – Cumulus Nimbus
By Lance Winslow

Okay so, when we talk about using clouds in the Battlespace most modern day warriors assume we are talking about some sort of secured electronic communication scheme using cloud computing strategies. However, I’d like to talk about real clouds, that is to say; thunder clouds. Also, I’d like to discuss how we can use weather as a force multiplier in regional conflicts and during actual military operations – specifically I’d like to discuss using UAVs to make clouds as an asset for cover, disruption, and an aerial fog of war.

Yes, humans have been plus or minus able to create clouds. Often they do this during severe drought periods, when there isn’t enough rain for the crops. Occasionally they create too many clouds, and the downpour continues, and that deluge causes severe flooding. Yes, it’s rather unfortunate to go from drought stricken times, to massive floods. Nevertheless, what mankind has learned from this can also be used in warfare. It can be used as a force multiplier to force your political will onto your enemy, the same enemy that wants to kill you.

In other words, what I’m suggesting is that we create devices which can create thunderclouds, Cumulus Nimbus Clouds, to just disrupt the enemy, make it difficult for them to see, hear, or shoot down our aerial assets; also to protect our troops from enemy aerial assets, which our enemy might use for close air support. Owning the air and controlling the airspace above the battlefield is ultra-important in modern warfare. But to fully control the air above the battlespace, it will be necessary to also control the weather.

Indeed, from all my studies I cannot dismiss the fact that it is possible, and we have unmanned aerial vehicles which can do this for us without putting human pilots in jeopardy. It has always been difficult to seed the clouds with chemicals, compounds, and dry ice type solutions without causing the aircraft itself to run into challenges (carburetor ice, massive ice build-up on the wings and airfoils) causing it to lose power and crash. However, with new materials, new paint coatings, and robotic systems we should be able to do this very easily using a swarming grid technique and no more than two crisscross patterns.

Thunder and lightning will severely disrupting enemies communications, and provide another layer of fog which will disrupt their command-and-control. They will also have to deal with lightning strikes, rain, hail, and adverse weather conditions, as our blue force converges on the enemy to eliminate and annihilate them. The United States military must have the strongest force in the solar system to protect this great nation, our assets, and our allies. We must stand tall, proud, and be victorious at every possible turn, no matter what, so help us God. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 24,500 articles by August 24th or 25th will be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..

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The Nebra Sky Disc
By Richard Quindry

With new archeological discoveries come changes in our perceptions of the past. Our image of the history of civilization is ever-changing, as ancient artifacts provide new insights into the evolution of Man’s knowledge of the Universe.

What we once thought of as a brutish, ignorant culture – lacking understanding of the stars in the heavens – existing in Bronze Age Europe (3500-1200 BCE) appears to be quite different since discovery of Nebra Sky disk. This large bronze and gold medallion serves as an astrological chart that denotes among other things both the Summer and Winter solstice and the constellation known as the Pleiades. This would tend to indicate a European culture more advanced than what was thought to exist at that time (circa 1600 BCE).

The story of this object subsequent to its discovery in 1999 has been partly a tale of science and part detective story. What began as a treasure hunt was considered grave robbing by authorities in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Henry Westphal and Mario Renner were operating without a license when their metal detector led them to several bronze age artifacts buried in the Ziegelgorda Forest.

In addition to the Nebra Sky disk the items included two bronze swords, two hatchets, a chisel and some fragments of spiral bracelets. The significance of the Bronze disk, which has acquired a blue-green patina with age, is found in its inlaid gold symbols. The symbols are thought to depict the Sun, a crescent moon and at least one known star cluster. Two arcs are believed to represent the Summer and Winter Solstice with a third, located at the bottom, interpreted by some as an archaic symbol of a “Sunship.”

This well-known symbol of Egyptian Mythology represents the ship used by the sun-god Ra as he traverses the sky from East to West each day. It now reveals an ancient Nordic sun-cult as evidenced in various ceremonial and ornamental objects. A connection between peoples of southern Scandinavia and the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean is unclear. The science of archeology often opens the door to more inquiry leaving us with ever more questions in search of answers.

After its discovery, an episode of skullduggery began for the disk. Westphal and Renner immediately sold their ill-gotten booty for 31,000 DM to an antiquities dealer in Cologne. Afterward it changed hands several times as it moved about Germany, selling for up to 1 million DM. Existence of the Disk eventually became public knowledge and by February of 2002 authorities, working with state archeologist Harald Meller, were able to acquire the artifact during a sting operation led by police. The object was purchased from a couple in Basel in a black market transaction for 700,000 DM.

Initially Meller was not shown the disk, but instead was given one of the bronze swords to authenticate. After several delays and prolonged moments of silence had added to the suspense for Meller, the mysterious stranger finally produced the object from under his shirt. Adding to the intrigue, it remained covered in a towel until it was slowly unwrapped. The scientist, awed by the apparent age of the disk, was then able to make a cursory examination before consummating the deal. The priceless historical piece now resides in Landesmuseum f�r Vorgeschichte (State Museum for Prehistory)

When the investigative trail led back to the looters they were able to avoid bargain for a reduced sentence by agreeing to show police and archeologists the location of the site where the had been found. They eventually were given sentences of six and twelve months, respectively. In a twist of fate an Appeals Court increased their original four and ten month sentences.

Even so, the mystery surrounding the Sun Disk continued. In an effort to authenticate the disk an analysis of the metal was performed. In a process called x-ray fluorescence, it was determined that the copper had come from primitives mines in Austria, the gold from the river Carnon in Cornwall and the bronze content had also originated in Cornwall. However, since metal cannot be dating by the Radiocarbon dating method used on organic materials, a method of comparative analysis was performed using a piece of birch bark found with the swords. The estimate of 1600 to 1560 BCE was now confirmed.

Yet as these issues are laid to rest there is still much more left to speculation. We continue to wonder about these people now so distant in the mist of time. We can only imagine what it must have been like as they opened their eyes to a new age of knowledge and enlightenment. A new age was dawning, one that was as bright as the Sun’s corona itself.

Richard Quindry writes fiction and non-fiction on his website. He can be contacted via email at the email address shown below. He accepts free lance assignments and enjoys researching topics of every sort. He is an avid reader of many other Blogs and likes to share ideas with other writers.

His favorite books include mysteries, science-fiction and biographies. He also enjoys writing poetry, a talent he acquired from his grandfather.

Richard Quindry
askhugh@hughcares.net

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Saturn’s Great White Spot, a recurring storm on that planet that has intrigued scientists since it was first observed in 1876, is a windy, towering cloud of ammonia and water spewing out super jolts of thunder and lightning. Now astronomers and NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, have captured the most detailed views to date of the phenomenon. Read more:
NASA spacecraft offers detailed views of Saturn’s Great White Spot.

An image of Saturn taken by NASA spacecraft Cassini shows the Great White Spot in the planet's northern hemisphere. (NASA / July 7, 2011)

The Neanderthal never stood a chance. Modern humans who entered Europe may have outnumbered their hominid relatives 10 to 1, a new study has found.

The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, helps explain why Neanderthals — who had lived in Europe for at least 200,000 years — died out about 40,000 years ago, soon after modern humans migrated from Africa.

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Consciousness is one of the most important aspects of being human. It allows for the subjective experience called life. Yet where does consciousness come from? Answering this question has known a long history ranging from ancient times to the technological present. Where do we stand now? This article provides an overview of contemporary consciousness research.

Being conscious is one of the most mysterious and most familiar aspects of human life; people feel the wind blowing on their face on the way to class, listen to an informative lecture and taste a delicious meal once back home, they are aware of it, they think. But how do people think? This question has been one of the most fundamental questions in biology, psychology and philosophy since the emergence of conscious human thought.

However, research on consciousness was once considered out of the reach of science and even banned as a research topic, as it was a subject only appropriate for philosophy and religion. One of the main reasons for this was that consciousness as a concept is highly subjective and very broad: it encompasses self-awareness and experiences according to Campbell and Reece (2008). On a more positive note, consciousness research, starting with Descartes in the 17th century, has seen a vast increase in scientific research performed in the past few decades, something accurately described by Velmans and Schneider (2007).

By providing an historical account on the scientific research of consciousness, it might be possible to create a better understanding of current issues in scientific consciousness research. However, in order to improve current research and understandings, it is necessary to maintain an aim toward the future, as is acknowledged by Searle (1998). Moreover, according to Revonsuo (2009), this future of consciousness research is only feasible if there came into existence a unified research program on which all future research is based. Despite this, a critical perspective in such concepts remains essential as often only hypotheses are constituted, which are formulated without being empirically proven.

One contemporary fundamental problem though, labeled ‘the hard problem’ by Chalmers (1999) seems to be intrinsically interwoven with consciousness research. This problem describes the difficulties in crossing the explanatory gap when linking brain mechanisms and the subjective experience that is part of consciousness. Therefore the technological progress made in the past years is auspicious, as it could possibly cross the gap between findings in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and scientific philosophy and the subjective aspects of consciousness, as acknowledged by Grienfield and Collins (2005) and others.

Definition of consciousness

One prerequisite for the analysis of scientific consciousness research is a working definition of consciousness, especially since consciousness is considered a very ambiguous term, something which tends to create confusion.

According to Revonsuo, consciousness is the ‘subjective psychological reality within which all of us live our lives’ (2009) but a distinction is made between various definitions of consciousness. Nonetheless, the most important concept required for a scientific explanation of consciousness seems to be that which refers to the presence of qualitative and subjective experience as an intrinsic part of consciousness.

Another attempt to provide a working definition is made by Grienfield and Collins, who also admit the concept is highly ambiguous, something responsible for major problems in consciousness research (2005). However, despite making various distinctions between notions such as wakefulness and awareness, and putting emphasis on the need to evade the mistake of confusing consciousness with self-consciousness, which is only an aspect of consciousness, it is acknowledged that consciousness is above all characterized by subjective and qualitative experiences. This same concept is also acknowledged by Velmans and Schneider (2007) and therefore, the definition of consciousness as characterized by subjective experiences will be used in this paper.

History of consciousness research

Systematic efforts to acquire an understanding of what constitutes this subjective experience are characterized by a long history. This history has its roots in the 17th century, the period in which Rene Descartes lived, the first person attempting to systematically research consciousness. The findings and theories derived from his research continue to influence others nowadays, as will be observed later. Moreover, his influence can be explained by the fact that he was the first person to highlight the most difficult problem still confronting consciousness researchers at present, which is the problem of explaining how consciousness could possibly emerge from the brain. The difficulty of this problem is described in Descartes’ dualism theory, in which it is described how a clear distinction must be made between the mind and the body, since both of these are described in terms of very distinct characteristics: the main characteristics of the body are attributed to physical processes, whereas the main characteristics of the mind are attributed to thought. However, such a distinction is not considered to be a satisfactory explanation for consciousness in the realm of science and therefore still remains a challenge in consciousness research nowadays.

Nonetheless, Descartes was also among the first to consider a correlation of consciousness and neural processes. His conclusions include findings which recognize the brain as an important aspect in sensory inputs and motor outputs and outputs, but by these the brain only functioned as a small aspect of consciousness. According to Descartes, the pineal gland in the brain served as a connection between the mind and the body, with the former being ultimately in control provided with cues by the pineal gland in the brain. This connection between the mind and the pineal gland can be observed to be the first systematic approach of scientific research on consciousness; yet, it were the implications of Descartes’ dualism theory that had a major impact on humanities’ perspective on consciousness.

Since Descartes, various attempts, mostly philosophical in nature, have been made to clarify the connection between consciousness and the physical body. These attempts include theories by Spinoza, Leibniz and Berkely, who all lived in the 17th or 18th century. Spinoza’s dual aspect theory implies that consciousness and the physical world are one and the same, both being different aspects of the same thing. Contrary to this was Leibniz’s theory of psychophysical parallelism, which proposes a separation of the mind and the body as different substances, collaborating in harmony. Another influential theory in the 18th century was Berkeley’s immaterialism, stating that nothing existed unless it was a mind or being perceived by one. Even though a thorough explanation of these is beyond the scope of this paper, the existence of these theories indicated that consciousness studies were rising, despite lacking an empirical scientific foundation.  Nonetheless, it is a theory proposed in the 18th century which forms the essence of the convictions many researchers attempting to link consciousness to neural correlates are holding nowadays. This theory, labeled materialism, was first proposed by de la Mettrie and it states how matter, and thus the physical body, is responsible for all mental processes, which are the result from complex processes in the brain .

However, ideas in the 18th century differed greatly and were in some cases contradicting, which is illustrated by Kant, who rejected the notion that science could ever explain consciousness, as calculations and experiments could not be applied to describe or test mental processes since these varied only in time and were subjective. Similar to Descartes’ dualism, these concepts formed the basis of the premise that psychology, the study of the mind, was ‘not a proper subject for scientific enquiry’, a conviction held by many until the late 19th century .

Despite this, human enquiries about the nature of consciousness set in motion two important developments that contributed to the scientific study of consciousness in the 19th century. First of these is the development of psychophysics, which regards mental phenomena suitable for experiments and mathematical modeling. The basis of this method is formed by sensations, and thus subjective experiences, and shows that differences in intensity depend on the strength of a certain stimulus. However, it could not yet be measured what the connection between this intensity of sensation and nervous activity was.

Additional to the development of psychophysics were significant improvements made in the understanding of the nervous system which gradually accumulated in the acknowledgement of the neuron as the basic information processing unit. This is considered one of the major developments in the last fifty years, and came parallel with the rise of information theory, a mathematical technique that allows the quantification of ‘the amount of information in a signal, the rate of transmission of information through a communication channel, and the capacity of a communication channel’ . Linking the application of this theory to mental processes was an important step in the search for a scientific account of consciousness. Eventually, the impact of information theory on psychology led to the formation of cognitive psychology, which is especially noteworthy as consciousness is often an object of study for cognitive psychologists. These cognitive psychologists eventually demonstrated that various cognitive processes such as memory, perception and action are partly processed on a subconscious, automatic level; something also considered one of the major developments in consciousness research.

However, one of the major disadvantages of cognitive psychological methods was that the results of cognitive psychological experiments often relied on methods such as introspection and meta-cognition, which do not take into account the possibility that subjects are actually not conscious of a certain stimulus when they detect one, but that their success is the result of processes performed on the subconscious level, which is a significant limitation in consciousness research, as this would evade the notion of subjective experience .

Fortunately, the development of new brain imaging techniques in the past decades has contributed significantly to a solution of this problem and is still giving rise to a great number of neuroscientific breakthroughs, as well as a large variety of theories attempting to explain of consciousness. However, these different theories have also contributed to the incoherency of consciousness research, which will be discussed later on.

Current finding & the hard problem

Nonetheless, brain imaging techniques (including MRI, fMRI, PET, and EEG) share their ability to provide structural insights into the neural processes and their location in the brain, and have provided neuroscientists with a great number of opportunities to assist  them in their search for the neural correlates of consciousness . A characteristic of scientific consciousness research in the past decades can thus be observed in the rise of a vast amount of neuroscientific research aimed at certain aspects of consciousness.

Several applications of this research are for example aimed at the study of neuropathologies, impaired and altered forms of consciousness (sometimes also induced by drugs or certain brain supplements). An illustration of such research attempts to study the characteristics of brain functioning of people in a ‘minimally conscious state’, which is a condition of ‘severely altered consciousness in which minimal but definite behavioral evidence of self or environmental awareness is demonstrated’. Unfortunately, the results of this research have proven unsuccessful in mapping the neural processes that govern consciousness. Similarly, as is illustrated by the failed attempts of researchers studying the loop of bioelectrical activity in corticocortical and thalamocortical loops, which is responsible for the subjective experiences that constitute consciousness according to the ‘master-loop’ hypothesis , no other research has as of yet been able to discover neural mechanisms that explain subjective experiences.

These failed attempts in discovering the neural processes that constitute consciousness illustrate the major problem in consciousness research: the ‘hard problem’. This ‘hard problem’ is observed to be the reason for most failed scientific explanations of consciousness. According to Chalmers, the problems facing consciousness research can be divided into two categories: the ‘easy problems’ and the ‘hard problem’. The easy problems included those of explaining certain mental phenomena such as the integration of information, the focusing of attention and the differences between sleep and wakefulness, and can all be explained by cognitive and neurophysiological models, something which is acknowledged and more accurately described by Greenfield and Collins.

However, the hard problem is of an entirely different nature and refers to the fundamental aspect of subjective experience that is intrinsically interwoven with consciousness. This problem emerges from the necessary, but unproven, assumption that physical processes give rise to subjective experiences. The difficulties are observed in the unexplainable character of subjective experiences rising from certain mechanisms, as, even when a particular mechanism is explained by cognitive or neuroscientific modelling, it cannot be derived from research why the actual subjective experience is connected to this mechanism. This creates an ‘explanatory gap’ between the subjective aspects of consciousness, and the objective nature of neuroscientific research, which is responsible for ‘the most difficult challenge for the science of consciousness.

Consequently, it can be observed how this ‘hard problem’ shares similarities with the mind-body problem initially described by Descartes, who proposed an absolute distinction between matter and mind. However, according to leading neuroscientists, this gap is caused by a lack of current understanding of the brain and the related mechanisms, suggesting that the gap will be bridged as neuroscience and related technology continue to develop. This auspicious conclusion is derived from the similar manner explanatory gaps existed and have been bridged in many fundamental questions in science, such as the explanatory gaps between physics and chemistry in the 19th century, or in the search for the origin of life in the 20th century .

The future of consciousness research

Apart from this, a lack of coherence and unity in consciousness research seems to be a more basic problem in consciousness research. Theories range from quantum theoretical approaches based on collapsing quantum fields, coherent superposition of microtubules and other microphysical phenomena, to various neuroscientific theories. Illustrations of these neuroscientific theories are based on the response of receptors at specific types of synapses, the existence of specific ‘consciousness neurons’, and the dependence on synchronized activity of large neuron groups. Concluding from this, scientific consciousness research seems to be thriving, but the field itself has yet failed in ‘establishing a shared big picture of consciousness’ , and most of the theories often propose different principles and lack empirical evidence, which appears unbeneficial to consciousness research.

According to Revonsuo, a solution for this situation would be a unified research program based on the premise that consciousness is a ‘biological phenomenon that literally resides within the confines of the brain’ (2009), something which has earlier been acknowledged to be a necessary premise by Churchland (1997). This research program would view consciousness as part of a specific level of organization in the brain and would relate consciousness research within the various biological sciences, especially cognitive neuroscience, to this basic principle. By subdividing the explanation of consciousness into several levels of description, which are fundamentally smaller subtasks, a multilevel model would be created which frames the various aspects of consciousness in the right context and thereby establishes a research program that is unified and coherent. However, promising as it is possibly presented, it must be observed that this is only a proposal and its scientific feasibility not proven yet.

Nonetheless, the systematic approach of creating of unity and coherence in the field of consciousness might prove to be of essential importance, considering that science has answered many fundamental questions of life so far, but yet the nature of consciousness remains an elusive concept.

Observing in retrospect, consciousness research has seen the rise and fall of a large number of theories and concepts since Descartes’ expressed his dualism theory; ranging from dual aspect theory, parallelism and materialism, proposed by various philosophers, to materialism, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology and the growing understanding of the nervous system, on which the scientific approach nowadays is mostly based . Especially the latter aspects, supported by the most recent technological advancements such as brain imaging techniques, might prove to be successful in providing a satisfactory explanation of the subjective experiences that constitute consciousness, and thus solve ‘the hard problem’. Yet, the failed attempts in finding a scientific explanation of consciousness illustrate that technological improvements might have to be made before this would be possible. Parallel to this, the current lack of a coherent and theoretical basis has shown to be problematic. Fortunately, auspicious concepts such as the research program proposed by Revonsuo (2009) have the potential to be of great importance.

Therefore, technological improvements or a unified research program could explain the explanatory gap one day, making the assumption this is possible. Moreover, as history has proven several times so far, humanity has the capacity to build bridges across such gaps, unbridgeable as they might seem at first, and thus it might only be a matter of time until that which makes us all think, can finally explained by science.

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What Are the Psychological Ramifications of Long Term Human Hibernation?
By Lance Winslow

Imagine going to sleep for many decades and when you wake up, most all of your friends have passed on, and you’ve missed a good chunk of human history. When you go back to where you used to live everything has changed. You don’t know how to drive the new flying planes, which by the way drive themselves, and your knowledge, education, experience, and career resume are basically; obsolete.

Now what you ask yourself?

If you think this scenario is hypothetical, think again, as human science is almost there, within 2-3 decades it will be entirely possible. Okay so, you might not care too much for psychologists, but if you think suicide rates are tough on returning soldiers, just think if you come back out of your deep sleep and you have no friends, very little family, or great-great-great grandchildren whose parents you never knew and whose grandparents were merely babies when you checked out.

Why would you volunteer for such a long-term sleep?

Well, what if you were traveling to a distant part of the solar system, or to another solar system and back, sleeping both ways, during the trip? Yep, that would be a trip wouldn’t it? What if you had a disease and scientists hadn’t yet discovered the cure and once they did they woke up some 50,000 of you all with the same disease and cured you and then back into society you go!

Can you see how this will one day be the reality?

Since there aren’t enough psychologists, they now use avatars and computer systems. So you will be talking to a virtual friend, instead of a real human to help you through your psychological trauma, or getting you readjust to society. But now in 2184 the society is nothing like it was, and the social network with all your friends, and your virtual trends that you agreed to have join your webpage, aren’t the same either. Instead they install a microchip into your brain, and you are allowed to do thought-swapping.

However, in this day and age of 2184 everything is very politically correct.

Some thoughts are not allowed, and to help you re-adjust, you are only allowed to think to your avatar friends, and you can create as many as you wish, but you’re not ready to deal with regular humans yet, because the regular humans you used to know are now all slightly modified, everything has changed.

The world has changed a lot since you been gone.

In fact, everyone who is woken up is put on suicide watch, and your thoughts are monitored in case you might harm yourself, so all the thoughts you share with your avatar going to a central computer. If you start thinking about such thoughts the authorities show up at your door to protect you from yourself, by taking you away. Even though now that you are 100% perfectly healthy and young again, you have new energy, and it feels great, even if you are all alone in a brave new but troubling time.

Lance Winslow is the Founder of the Online Think Tank, a diverse group of achievers, experts, innovators, entrepreneurs, thinkers, futurists, academics, dreamers, leaders, and general all around brilliant minds. Lance Winslow hopes you’ve enjoyed today’s discussion and topic. http://www.WorldThinkTank.net – Have an important subject to discuss, contact Lance Winslow.

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