The Questions Nobody Asks: Where Do You Go From Here

By Robert Mills

In today's busy world people become so preoccupied with their day-to-day existence that they rarely have time to T_H_I_N_K!
I have designed this group of topics as conversation starters and short stories that cause the reader to think. They are meant to be kicked around, argued over, de¬veloped, expanded, and speculated upon in an endless game of What if! The modern world is designed so that you don't have to think. There are forces and organizations that want to make your choices for you and make it easy for you not to bother yourself with questioning them. As a result, we are losing the art of thinking things through.
Think about yourself, who you really are and where you are going, both in this life and the next one. Don't be afraid of finding answers that make you uncomfortable because having control over your life requires that you look at all the possibilities and make a choice instead of ignoring them and letting a choice be made for you.
Each of the following sections are also designed to promote the art of conversation. Examining such issues with others is a way to know them. When, if ever, will human beings learn to get along? When will we put race, color of skin, wealth, fame, politics and religion aside enough to accept each other as equals and live in harmony with each other? When we learn to focus on our similarities instead of our differences?
Did you ever wonder where you come from beyond your mother's womb?
Where do you go from here?
What would you change if you could?
What do you think?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9798985078800

Robert Mills

Robert Mills was born in 1950 and trained as a doctor in London. He worked as a consultant ENT surgeon in Dundee and Edinburgh. After retiring from the British Health Service and his marriage to a Thai doctor, he moved to Thailand. He has three children and three grandchildren, all of whom live in the UK. Burlington Bertie is Robert’s sixth published novel with Troubador Publishing.

Book preview

PART ONE

What About the World Around You?

HYPOTHESIS ONE

What if You Could Explore Outer Space?

How many times have you looked up at the stars and wondered what’s really out there? Astronomers have only explored about fou r percent of the visible universe and there’s a vast part we cannot see at all which is called Dark Matter. What if you could fly through space without regard for distance, time, temperature, or the limits of the human body? Seeing the planets of our solar system alone would be breathtaking. Think of Mars, the red planet or the rings of Saturn or the great eye of cloud covered Jupiter. Jupiter is three hundred times larger than the Earth. For many years scientists believed that it had twelve moons circling it, one of which (Ganymede) is larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto but estimates now run as high as seventy-nine moons. The four largest were all discovered and named by Galileo and are called Io, Europa, Ganymede and Calisto. The mighty Saturn has even more with a total of 82 moons.

Our Solar System contains eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune listed in order of their distance from the Sun. Pluto use to be considered the ninth planet but after astronomers learned that it was actually a small planetary system it was reclassified as a dwarf planet along with its other two components, Ceres and Eris. For some years, many astronomers had argued for Pluto to be declassified as a planet because many similar objects approaching its size had been found in the same region of the Solar System during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Our solar system revolves around the Sun which is actually a medium sized star and is a mere spec compared to the largest star in our galaxy, UY Scuti, a massive red supergiant. It is located in the constellation Scutum and measures about 750 million miles across. If this red giant was at the center of our universe, it would not only extend past Earth but well past Jupiter. Stars age like everything else and red giants are stars in a late stage of evolution where no hydrogen remains in the core to fuel nuclear fusion. They have a high luminosity but a relative low surface temperature. Our sun has a temperature of 5,570 degrees Kelvin (about ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit) whereas a typical Red Giant is burning at 3,500 degrees Kelvin. Betelgeuse is a red giant that is easy to spot in the night sky as it is the Eastern (upper left) shoulder of the constellation Orion. The brightest star in Orion is called Rigel, a blue supergiant. Blue supergiants are extremely hot and bright, with surface temperatures of between 36,000 - 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

In addition to stars and planets outer space contains many other wonders. One of the most amazing is the comet. Comets are giant snowballs made up of frozen gases, rock and dust which have their own unique orbits around the Sun. In fact, the length of their orbits is how they are classified into two categories – short-period comets orbit the sun in under two hundred years while long-period comets take over two hundred years. Some comets take as long as a hundred thousand to a million years to orbit the Sun. They generally move at a speed of around two miles per hour but the closer they get to the sun, the faster they move. When frozen, comets are virtually impossible to spot even though they can be as large as a small town. But when a comet’s orbit approaches the sun, it heats up and begins to spew dust and gas that forms a giant glowing head that is larger than most planets.

Another beautiful thing in outer space is a nebula. A nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space. Some are formed from the gas and dust thrown out by the explosion of a dying star, such as a supernova, but others are the birth of a star. The gases are mostly hydrogen and helium and eventually, the clump of dust and gas gets so big that it collapses from its own gravity. This collapse causes the material at the center of the cloud to heat up- and this hot core is the beginning of a star. For this reason, some nebulae are called star nurseries.

While comets and nebulae can be awesome to see, asteroids are pretty much just big pieces of rock. These pieces are left over from the formation of our solar system, and they can range in size from that of a car to a large city. Some asteroids are metallic while others are rich in carbon, giving them a coal-black color. They can be rubble piles, loosely held together by their own gravity, or they can be solid rocks. Most of the asteroids in our solar system reside in a region called the main asteroid belt. This vast, doughnut-shaped ring between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter contains hundreds of thousands of asteroids, perhaps even millions. But despite the way science fiction movies depict them as dangerous clusters, there is usually a great deal of space between each asteroid.

Meteoroids are also rocks in space that orbit the sun but they are significantly smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from small grains to a few feet wide. In most cases, meteors that reach our atmosphere burn up well before they hit the ground, but about six thousand a year (about 17 a day) make it through. The vast majority fall unnoticed, in uninhabited areas, but several times a year, a few land in places that catch more attention.

While the size and temperature of objects in outer space can be mind boggling, the distance between them is even more so. Relatively short distances are measured in miles. For example, the moon is about 240 thousand miles away from Earth. The closest planet to us, Mars, is about forty million miles away while the Sun is 93 million miles from us. That’s all in our solar system. Most distances in space are measured in light years. A light year is just as it sounds - the distance that light can travel in one year. Since light moves at the speed of 186, 282 miles per second (or about 671 million miles per hour), a light year is about six trillion miles. The nearest star to us besides the Sun is Alpha Centauri which is 4.3 light years away or approximately 26 trillion miles away. That’s 26 with twelve zeros behind it. A billion is a thousand million. A trillion is a thousand billion. And that’s the nearest star.

Space is all about distance. The stars Betelgeuse and Rigel were in Orion are very visible. Yet, Betelgeuse is 642.5 light years from us, and Rigel is 864.3 light years away. The largest star we know of, UY Scuti, is 5,219 light years away. There is a star named Icarus which is only visible through the Hubble telescope because it is being magnified by the gravity of a massive galaxy cluster. It is the farthest individual star we have ever seen. It is at least five billion light-years from Earth. Galaxies, clusters of billions of stars (like our galaxy, the Milky Way) are naturally easier to see than an individual star and astronomers have been able to identify some that are over thirteen billion light years away. All we know for sure is that space is bigger than that!

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Hypothesis One Bibliography

By the Numbers | Jupiter – NASA Solar System Exploration

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov › planets › by-the-numbers

Comets: Facts About The 'Dirty Snowballs' of Space | Space

https://www.space.com › 53-comets-formation-discover…

Comet - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Comet

Jupiter - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Jupiter

Latest News headlines, exclusives and opinion | The Sun

https://www.thesun.co.uk › new s

Meteoroid - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Meteoroid

The mystery of how big our Universe really is – BBC Future

https://www.bbc.com› future › article › 20210326-the-m.. .

Overview | Sun – NASA Solar System Exploration

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov › solar-system › overview

Overview | Meteors & Meteorites – NASA Solar System …

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov › overview

HYPOTHESIS TWO

What if Aliens have Visited Earth?

Most discussion about aliens on Earth take the form of two theories – whether or not aliens exist is one and whether or not aliens have visited Earth is the other. Claims of alien visitation vary from sensationalized accounts in supermarket tabloids to more credible accounts from respectable sources.

The term ‘unidentified flying object’ goes back at least to the 1950s: it is recorded in 1953, in a book by the US aviator and writer Donald Keyhoe. The Oxford English Dictionary also cites Edward Ruppelt, an officer in the USAF, who stated that he’d invented the term in 1956 as a more general one to replace the term flying saucer. Strange objects in the sky were first named flying saucers in the 1940s: the first OED citation is from The Times, in 1947. They were so called because of an account by a US pilot, Kenneth Arnold, who stated in various newspaper and radio interviews of that year that he’d seen ‘saucer-like’ objects in the sky while he was flying past Mount Rainier. The media seemed to have quickly changed this to the snappier flying saucer and the term was born. By the time Ruppelt and his USAF colleagues were investigating reports of these sightings in the 1950s, it was clear that ‘saucer’ was too limited a description, since the objects in question were said to be of many different shapes: hence Ruppelt’s invention of ‘UFO.’

The earliest alien report that really caught on was when a New Hampshire couple claimed they were captured by aliens on a late-summer evening in 1961 as they drove through the White Mountains. This first widely publicized alien abduction claims soon begat a legion of others. Even today, theories of alien visits spread like wildfire in the mainstream news if they are made by someone with reasonable credibility or authority. While Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard University’s astronomy department, didn’t propose that aliens were even close to Earth, he and a colleague suggested that the cigar shaped object called Oumuamua which passed by the sun in 2017 might have been a probe sent to the vicinity of Earth by an alien civilization. The theory, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, elicited some derision from scientists. The minor controversy led NASA physicist Silvano Colombano to say that scientists essentially rock the establishment when they theorize about extraterrestrial life. General avoidance of the subject by the scientific community creates a catch-22." While scientists might appear crazy for posing questions about aliens, how will we ever know about alien life or any possible alien missions to Earth if no one in the scientific community examines the concept?

Colombano himself got caught up in the debate last year, when Fox News reported he claimed aliens had indeed come to Earth, pointing to a document of his on the space agency’s website. But Colombano was quick to correct the Fox News story, saying it was taken out of context and that he believes an alien visit is only theoretically possible. My perspective was simply that reports of unidentified aerial phenomena should be the object of serious study, even if the chance of identification of some alien technology is very small.

There was a time that the mere idea of UFOs seemed like a loose-thread tear right through the fabric of reality, but when the New York Times published an undisputed account that the Pentagon had spent five years investigating unexplained aerial phenomena — the response among the paper’s mostly liberal readers, exhausted and beaten down by recent events, was markedly different from the one in those movies. The news that aliens might actually be visiting us, regularly and recently, didn’t provoke terror about a coming space-opera conflict but something much more like the Evangelical dream of the Rapture. The truth is out there, former senator Harry Reid tweeted, with a link to the story. Thank God, came the response through the Twitter vent. Could extraterrestrials help us save the Earth? went one typical reaction.

Suddenly, aliens were an escapist fantasy — but also more credible (legitimized by the government!) than mere fantasy. That Pentagon report, which featured two gripping videos of aerial encounters, was just one beat in a recent search-for- extraterrestrial-intelligence (or SETI). In October, an object passed through our solar system that looked an awful lot like a spaceship (Oumuamua); astronomers spent much of 2016 arguing over whether the weird pulses of light coming from a distant star were evidence of an alien megastructure. An army of Silicon Valley billionaires are racing to make first contact, and our new super-powered telescopes are discovering more conceivably habitable planets every year. Then, in March, a third video emerged, featuring a Navy encounter off the East Coast in 2015, with the group that released it hinting at an additional trove. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care? wondered a Washington Post op-ed. The defense Department claimed they initially withheld the release of the footage to ensure that nothing in the video was classified.

The Pentagon has confirmed the authenticity of newly leaked videos and images showing multiple UFO sightings by U.S. Navy personnel, as the government prepares to release a highly anticipated first-of-its-kind report on UFOs this summer. An 18- second video shows what is described as three pyramid-shaped UFOs hovering over the warship USS Russell at night in July of 2019 off the San Diego coast. At one point, the pyramid-shaped crafts reportedly hovered 700 feet over the tail of the Russell.

This is the first video the public has seen from the July 2019 incident in which mysterious UFOs described as unmanned aerial vehicles reportedly harassed at least three U.S. warships during military exercises over multiple days — at one point matching the speed and bearing of one destroyer for 90 minutes while performing brazen maneuvers.

Months earlier, an FA-18 pilot reportedly used his cellphone to snap photos of three different unidentified aircrafts off the coast of Oceana in March including two UFOs dubbed the Metallic Blimp and The Sphere. The unidentified aircrafts captured by the pilot in March 2019 were able to remain stationary in high winds, with no movement, beyond the capability of known balloons or drones, according to the mysterywire.com. I can confirm that the referenced photos and videos were taken by Navy personnel, Department of Defense spokesperson Susan Gough told Fox News. The UAPTF [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force] has included these incidents in their ongoing examinations.

The video and images were leaked to filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who made the documentary Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers, and KLAS TV’s chief investigative reporter George Knapp. Corbell and Knapp independently confirmed the leaked documents are unclassified images that were part of a series of classified briefings intended to educate members of the U.S. Intelligence Community about UFOs traveling in restricted airspace.

This is explosive information, Corbell told Fox News. This is probably the best UFO military filmed footage certainly that I’ve ever seen, but I think also that the world has ever seen.

In a separate event, three photos, leaked to Corbell, purportedly from the USS Omaha, show a spherical UFO descending into the ocean seamlessly disappearing without destruction. According to Corbell, a submarine unsuccessfully attempted to find the unidentified aerial vehicle. This is an extraordinary piece of technology, Corbell said. Whoever is operating these technologies are far more advanced than anything we have in the U.S. arsenal and that should be a warning sign. We need to find out the intent of the operators of these vehicles.

The Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) is now investigating what these unidentified aircrafts are. The UAPTF was formed in the summer of 2020 in an effort to improve the Department of Defense’s understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins UAPs particularly those incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace.

The fact that the UAPTF is still investigating these new incidents as unidentified aerial phenomena means they’ve already ruled out that they are balloons or basic drones from another country. These craft are not pushing something out the back to go forward, Corbell explained. They are gravitationally propelled craft that are trans medium — that can go from space to air to sea without destruction.

The Pentagon’s candor and decision to even acknowledge that the video and images of pyramid shaped aircrafts and UFOs over waters near Oceana are in fact real — is exciting UFO enthusiasts and experts worldwide who hope it’s the beginning of more transparency. According to data from the National UFO Reporting Center, sightings of unidentified objects in the air reportedly rose in 2020 by about 1,000 nationwide, to more than 7,200 sightings. Generally, we are getting more of what appear to be legitimate sightings of actual UFO’s then was the case even a few years ago, said Peter Davenport, director of the UFO reporting center.

Since November, he’s received five reports from cockpit crew members of unidentified objects flying at high altitude: It’s unusual. I don’t recall in 27 years having received five reports in just a matter of months.

Corbell said he does not know whether the recent images he obtained show UFOs from extraterrestrials visiting our planet, though he is certain the public should demand that our government transparently investigate their origins.

UFOs are real and they are here, but we don’t know who they are or the intent, Corbell said. That’s no longer a question. You have just not been paying attention.

There is a great deal of information on the possibility of life on worlds other than Earth, but much of it is confidential. Officially, the United States government has always denied that there was any real evidence for the existence of such aliens. But, on August 4, 2020, that all changed because that was when the United States Navy launched its Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The purpose of this department is to monitor ongoing encounters with strange aerial objects and determine whether these phenomena should be perceived as a threat. The task force was launched to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs, according to a news release.

While pentagon officials did not immediately elaborate about the timing of this announcement, what triggered it, or whether the UAP design-nation pertains directly to alien spacecraft. The statement elaborated as follows: The Department of Defense and the military departments take any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace very seriously and examine each report, the release states. This includes examinations of incursions that are initially reported as UAP when the observer cannot immediately identify what he or she is observing.

It’s widely known that many members of Congress and many Pentagon officials have long expressed concern regarding the appearance of unidentified aircraft in the vicinity of military installations. Some believe the sightings are intelligence-gathering drones operated by earthly adversaries rather than anything extraterrestrial.

While speculation has long been rife about whether Earthbound aliens are a threat the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said he is more concerned about whether the operators of these objects speak the language of a near-peer enemy. We have things flying over our military bases and places where we are conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours, so that’s a legitimate question to ask, Sen. Marco Rubio told Miami’s WFOR-TV. Frankly, if it’s something from outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some sort of technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary.

US military pilots and satellites have recorded a lot more’ UFO sightings than have been made public, Donald Trump’s former intelligence director John Ratcliffe said. Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public, he said. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by navy or pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.

Ratcliffe served about eight months as director of national intelligence at the end of Trump’s term. Earlier, Trump moved to nominate Ratcliffe for the role but Ratcliffe withdrew over concerns he had exaggerated and fibbed about his experience as a prosecutor in Texas. I actually wanted to get this information out and declassify it before I left office, Ratcliffe said, but we weren’t able to get it down into an unclassified format that we were able to talk about quickly enough.

We always look for a plausible explanation, Ratcliffe added. Sometimes we wonder whether our adversaries have technologies that are a little bit farther down the road than we thought or that we realized. But there are instances where we don’t have good explanations. So. in short, things that we are observing that are difficult to explain – and so there’s actually quite a few of those, and I think that that info has been gathered and will be put out in a way the American people can see.

Many people believe that visitors from another planet landed here long ago and are living among us. Helen Sharman, who visited the Soviet Mir space station in 1991, has said that aliens exist, there’s no two ways about it.

There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life, she went on. Will they be like you and me, made up of carbon and nitrogen? Maybe not. It’s possible they’re here right now and we simply can’t see them.

Sharman spent eight days as a researcher on the space mission when she was 27, making her one of the youngest people to enter orbit.

The Chinese have recently opened the world’s largest radar facility to listen for signs of aliens and our own NASA rovers ar e trawling Mars for evidence of past or present life forms, but humankind’s endless fascination with extraterrestrial life forms has so far proved fruitless. A former Pentagon official, who led a secret government program to research potential UFOs revealed to CNN in 2017, that there is evidence of alien life reaching Earth.

Radio Waves

The most significant amount of data arguing that there is life on other planets may be coming from radio telescopes. For years, scientists have been listening to signals from outer space trying to determine where, or in some cases, who they are coming from. There are a constant flow of radio signals produced quite naturally from the great many objects out there in space and in the vast majority of cases we have been able to identify the type of object, the way it is moving and its approximate location by the type of radio frequency it generates. But there are a few exceptions. One of the most interesting to scientists, especially those searching for alien life is a repeating signal, especially one that recurs intermittently.

A recent burst of cosmic radio waves detected within our galaxy were found to be repeating. The ultra-bright flashes of energy, more powerful than those emitted by the sun, come from a young star about 30,000 light-years from Earth. Multiple telescopes detected a cosmic signal coming from the star in April (of what year?), and in a new paper, scientists reveal that it repeated twice in the months since. Known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), these high-intensity emissions usually last only a fraction of a second. FRBs were first detected in 2007, but almost all that have been detected so far were too far away to clearly make out where