Implications of humans making deal with aliens

Jude1:3Contendforthefaith · Mar 14, 2021

The Holy Bible / Holy Church Fathers VS World Governments / secret societies

.

The Liturgist · Mar 14, 2021

Jude1:3Contendforthefaith said:
The Holy Bible / Holy Church Fathers VS World Governments / secret societies

.

Come on dude, you ought to know that’s bad theology and you ought to know it makes the Orthodox Church, which is near and dear to me, look bad. Ask your priest about spaceflight. And if he says its false, then tell us what jurisdiction you’re a member of, because I would be shocked out of my mind if any priest in a canonical Orthodox jurisdiction said that, with the possible exception of some poorly educated clergy in certain impoverished regions who were ordained prior to or immediately after the fall of Communism.

For example, there was the hieromonk in Moldova who was deposed, defrocked, laicized and arrested by the police for drowning an infant during baptism, which was a horrible embarassment to both the Moldovan and Bessarabian Orthodox Churches; I don’t recall which of those two he was a member of, the former is an autonomous church under His Holiness the Moscow Patriarch, and the latter is an autonomous church under His Beatitude the Patriarch of Romania. But Orthodox Christianity in Moldova was chagrinned as a result of that tragedy. I believe from my recollection of the incident that it was not intentional but rather the hieromonk did not know how to baptize infants, but it could have been intentional as apparently the family was warning him that what he was doing would drown the baby. So at a minimum, it would be second degree murder due to negligence. An extreme tragedy. But I believe it was due to incompetence. And as such, it underscores the need for proper training and vetting of clergy; one thing I love about the Orthodox Church is that it provides seminaries but not all jurisdictions require priests to be ordained through them; the ancient approach of clergy being directly trained and ordained by the bishop or his subordinates is still used (this is also the approach used by the Coptic Orthodox Church, where priests, who usually have degrees in accounting or engineering or other areas of secular knowledge, are selected by the bishop and then sent to a monastery for 40 days to learn how to serve the liturgy).

So it is remotely possible that in a rural area that was once Communist, you could have a serving priest who, suspicious of the former Soviet Union and suspicious of the United States, out of cynicism and lack of education does not believe in the existence of the space program, but he is gravely mistaken. Most Orthodox priests will assure you of its existence. Indeed, the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church blesses Soyuz rockets and all Cosmonauts and Astronauts traveling on them should be enough to convince anyone.

But if that doesn’t convince you, well, you can see the ISS with a telescope, and in some cases, with the naked eye (it will appear kind of like a slow moving meteor as it crosses the night sky, since it is in LEO, whereas many satellites including those uses for television are in GEO, which means they dwell over the same location on Earth, but are at a much higher altitude, meaning that for communications purposes, there is a noticeable delay, which can be observed in live news programs when someone in a studio is talking to a reporter or conducting an interview of someone in a remote location.

Also, the GPS and its Russian, European Space Agency, British*, and Chinese counterparts** GLASNOSS, Galileo, and whatever the Chinese and British are calling their systems, prove the existence of space flight; their constellations of satellites in low earth orbit can be observed and detected, and GPS satellites transmit information including the identity of the individual satellite, the time registered by that satellite’s onboard chronometer, and the system health (which satellites are offline or could be taken offline for maintenance).

Because these satellites travel at a high speed relative to the surface of the Earth, there is a very slight but important difference in the time registered on their respective chronometers vs. the time experienced by a stationary user of GPS. Navigational satellite receivers triangulate replies from satellites, or vice versa, and are designed to compensate for the time dilation due to relativistic velocities the satellites experience (to a miniscule degree, but not the infinitessimal degree that the clocks would differ of someone on a train vs. someone walking vs. someone standing still - in other words, the impact of relativity owing to the speed at which the satellites are moving relative to the surface of the Earth is enough to potentially impact navigation). As a result of the measures taken to correct for time dilation, GPS provides a very accurate time source, and stratum 1 Network Time Protocol servers*** which are responsible for keeping the clocks of important servers and routers on the Internet, as well as any end user devices configured for it (such as Windows machines, which use time.microsoft.net), are required to use a high accuracy “stratum 0” time source, such as an atomic clock, or the much cheaper option of a GPS receiver. A friend of mine is the developer of gpsd, which provides this and other functionality on Linux and other open source operating systems.

* The British government acquired at firesale prices a bankrupt American company that was deploying a constellation of satellites in Low Earth Orbit, which the British plan to complete, over time, and use for navigation, so that their military has a redundant system in case anything ever happens to GPS.

** GLOSNASS started development shortly after the US started working on GPS, but has only been operational for the past decade. I can’t recall the status of the Chinese or European systems, whether they are complete or what their timetable is, but I will look into it. One of the beautiful side effects of these additional navigation systems is that receivers exist which can get your location using each of them, providing a substantial increase in accuracy. Likewise, as a tier 0 time source, if you use a GPS receiver which also talks to GLOSNASS and Galileo, that represents a further boost in accuracy. Really, the only thing better than that would be the most precisely calibrated atomic clock, or the use of astronomical data, specifically pulsars, which emit bursts of photons at regular intervals, which provide extremely accurate timekeeping and validate what Scripture says about the Heavens.

*** Stratum 0 devices are supposed to be atomic clocks or GPS receivers or other high accuracy chronometers, stratum 1 NTP servers are directly connected to those devices with a latency of microseconds, which is known and consistent and can be accounted for, stratum 2 NTP servers connect to one or in many cases several stratum 1 or other stratum 2 NTP servers, and stratum 3 devices are end user devices connected ideally to one or more stratum 2 servers, but which do not provide NTP services to other computers. Ideally, each large local area network or residential ISP service area will have a redundant pair of caching DNS servers and a redundant pair of stratum 2 NTP servers which are limited to answering NTP queries from devices on the network. This is to minimize traffic on the wide area network in the form of DNS and NTP queries. This kind of local stratum 2 NTP server ideally queries multiple stratum 2 NTP servers, and a stratum 3 device like a laptop which can’t rely on a local NTP server should likewise ideally query multiple multiple stratum 2 NTP devices, for two reasons: to minimize traffic demands on stratum 1 servers, and to improve accuracy over time if a particular stratum 1 device malfunctions or is defective and thus might not accurately keep time. So it is a very elegant architecture.

Since I left the UCC, I have supported myself and my ministry by deploying and administering high performance computing clusters, which some people call supercomputers, although not all of the systems I work on are technically supercomputers, and recently, most have run partially or in some cases entirely on public cloud services like Amazon. Once, I had the pleasure of doing a cluster in a datacenter in New Jersey for high speed trading; these clusters are not cloud based, and are located in New Jersey, in places like Newark, across the river from the Big Apple, for minimal latency connections to the NYSE, NASDAQ and the commodities and futures markets at the WTC. The cluster I built used a pair of switches from Arista Networks that ran Linux, had a field programmable gate array (essentially, hardware that you can program to do operations faster than eith conventional software), and each one was connected to an atomic clock, which provided redundant stratum 1 NTP to the rest of the cluster. The two switches were programmed by additional engineers to detect and respond to certain types of messages from the exchanges in hardware using the FPGAs, with extreme reliability due to the NTP device. Arista marketed these switches, which cost $50,000 each, specifically for high frequency traders, to whom cost was, in those days, no object. Most of the clusters I work on are for scientific and engineering applications where cost is very much an object, so that project was a nice change, and the Arista switches were awesome to play with.

So the cool thing about that is I can personally vouch for the existence of space travel, because I build computer systems which use NTP, which depends on space travel in the form of GPS satellites, or expensive atomic clocks which are bulky, and which in the case of New Jersey, took up 4U of rackspace (each unit was 2U, or 3.5”, tall, and a rack has 42U of space, each U being 1.75”), which we could have used for other things. In a typical datacenter you run out of power or have cooling issues before you run out of rackspace, but here we had sufficient power and cooling for a maximum density deployment, and that datacenter space and bandwidth was expensive; you could buy a new car with their monthly bill, but they were making enough to buy several ferraris a month for a time. But most of my clients who need high precision time keeping use a GPS receiver and back that up by talking to stratum 2 NTP servers, and this is economical and works well, and its cheap enough where you can actually put one in every computer. In fact, most client devices have them these days. So every time you use navigation on your smartphone, you are talking to spacecraft! This would all be science fiction as recently as 1980.

Jude1:3Contendforthefaith · Mar 14, 2021

The Liturgist said:
Come on dude, you ought to know that’s bad theology and you ought to know it makes the Orthodox Church, which is near and dear to me, look bad. Ask your priest about spaceflight. And if he says its false, then tell us what jurisdiction you’re a member of, because I would be shocked out of my mind if any priest in a canonical Orthodox jurisdiction said that, with the possible exception of some poorly educated clergy in certain impoverished regions who were ordained prior to or immediately after the fall of Communism.

For example, there was the hieromonk in Moldova who was deposed, defrocked, laicized and arrested by the police for drowning an infant during baptism, which was a horrible embarassment to both the Moldovan and Bessarabian Orthodox Churches; I don’t recall which of those two he was a member of, the former is an autonomous church under His Holiness the Moscow Patriarch, and the latter is an autonomous church under His Beatitude the Patriarch of Romania. But Orthodox Christianity in Moldova was chagrinned as a result of that tragedy. I believe from my recollection of the incident that it was not intentional but rather the hieromonk did not know how to baptize infants, but it could have been intentional as apparently the family was warning him that what he was doing would drown the baby. So at a minimum, it would be second degree murder due to negligence. An extreme tragedy. But I believe it was due to incompetence. And as such, it underscores the need for proper training and vetting of clergy; one thing I love about the Orthodox Church is that it provides seminaries but not all jurisdictions require priests to be ordained through them; the ancient approach of clergy being directly trained and ordained by the bishop or his subordinates is still used (this is also the approach used by the Coptic Orthodox Church, where priests, who usually have degrees in accounting or engineering or other areas of secular knowledge, are selected by the bishop and then sent to a monastery for 40 days to learn how to serve the liturgy).

So it is remotely possible that in a rural area that was once Communist, you could have a serving priest who, suspicious of the former Soviet Union and suspicious of the United States, out of cynicism and lack of education does not believe in the existence of the space program, but he is gravely mistaken. Most Orthodox priests will assure you of its existence. Indeed, the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church blesses Soyuz rockets and all Cosmonauts and Astronauts traveling on them should be enough to convince anyone.

But if that doesn’t convince you, well, you can see the ISS with a telescope, and in some cases, with the naked eye (it will appear kind of like a slow moving meteor as it crosses the night sky, since it is in LEO, whereas many satellites including those uses for television are in GEO, which means they dwell over the same location on Earth, but are at a much higher altitude, meaning that for communications purposes, there is a noticeable delay, which can be observed in live news programs when someone in a studio is talking to a reporter or conducting an interview of someone in a remote location.

Also, the GPS and its Russian, European Space Agency, British*, and Chinese counterparts** GLASNOSS, Galileo, and whatever the Chinese and British are calling their systems, prove the existence of space flight; their constellations of satellites in low earth orbit can be observed and detected, and GPS satellites transmit information including the identity of the individual satellite, the time registered by that satellite’s onboard chronometer, and the system health (which satellites are offline or could be taken offline for maintenance).

Because these satellites travel at a high speed relative to the surface of the Earth, there is a very slight but important difference in the time registered on their respective chronometers vs. the time experienced by a stationary user of GPS. Navigational satellite receivers triangulate replies from satellites, or vice versa, and are designed to compensate for the time dilation due to relativistic velocities the satellites experience (to a miniscule degree, but not the infinitessimal degree that the clocks would differ of someone on a train vs. someone walking vs. someone standing still - in other words, the impact of relativity owing to the speed at which the satellites are moving relative to the surface of the Earth is enough to potentially impact navigation). As a result of the measures taken to correct for time dilation, GPS provides a very accurate time source, and stratum 1 Network Time Protocol servers*** which are responsible for keeping the clocks of important servers and routers on the Internet, as well as any end user devices configured for it (such as Windows machines, which use time.microsoft.net), are required to use a high accuracy “stratum 0” time source, such as an atomic clock, or the much cheaper option of a GPS receiver. A friend of mine is the developer of gpsd, which provides this and other functionality on Linux and other open source operating systems.

* The British government acquired at firesale prices a bankrupt American company that was deploying a constellation of satellites in Low Earth Orbit, which the British plan to complete, over time, and use for navigation, so that their military has a redundant system in case anything ever happens to GPS.

** GLOSNASS started development shortly after the US started working on GPS, but has only been operational for the past decade. I can’t recall the status of the Chinese or European systems, whether they are complete or what their timetable is, but I will look into it. One of the beautiful side effects of these additional navigation systems is that receivers exist which can get your location using each of them, providing a substantial increase in accuracy. Likewise, as a tier 0 time source, if you use a GPS receiver which also talks to GLOSNASS and Galileo, that represents a further boost in accuracy. Really, the only thing better than that would be the most precisely calibrated atomic clock, or the use of astronomical data, specifically pulsars, which emit bursts of photons at regular intervals, which provide extremely accurate timekeeping and validate what Scripture says about the Heavens.

*** Stratum 0 devices are supposed to be atomic clocks or GPS receivers or other high accuracy chronometers, stratum 1 NTP servers are directly connected to those devices with a latency of microseconds, which is known and consistent and can be accounted for, stratum 2 NTP servers connect to one or in many cases several stratum 1 or other stratum 2 NTP servers, and stratum 3 devices are end user devices connected ideally to one or more stratum 2 servers, but which do not provide NTP services to other computers. Ideally, each large local area network or residential ISP service area will have a redundant pair of caching DNS servers and a redundant pair of stratum 2 NTP servers which are limited to answering NTP queries from devices on the network. This is to minimize traffic on the wide area network in the form of DNS and NTP queries. This kind of local stratum 2 NTP server ideally queries multiple stratum 2 NTP servers, and a stratum 3 device like a laptop which can’t rely on a local NTP server should likewise ideally query multiple multiple stratum 2 NTP devices, for two reasons: to minimize traffic demands on stratum 1 servers, and to improve accuracy over time if a particular stratum 1 device malfunctions or is defective and thus might not accurately keep time. So it is a very elegant architecture.

Since I left the UCC, I have supported myself and my ministry by deploying and administering high performance computing clusters, which some people call supercomputers, although not all of the systems I work on are technically supercomputers, and recently, most have run partially or in some cases entirely on public cloud services like Amazon. Once, I had the pleasure of doing a cluster in a datacenter in New Jersey for high speed trading; these clusters are not cloud based, and are located in New Jersey, in places like Newark, across the river from the Big Apple, for minimal latency connections to the NYSE, NASDAQ and the commodities and futures markets at the WTC. The cluster I built used a pair of switches from Arista Networks that ran Linux, had a field programmable gate array (essentially, hardware that you can program to do operations faster than eith conventional software), and each one was connected to an atomic clock, which provided redundant stratum 1 NTP to the rest of the cluster. The two switches were programmed by additional engineers to detect and respond to certain types of messages from the exchanges in hardware using the FPGAs, with extreme reliability due to the NTP device. Arista marketed these switches, which cost $50,000 each, specifically for high frequency traders, to whom cost was, in those days, no object. Most of the clusters I work on are for scientific and engineering applications where cost is very much an object, so that project was a nice change, and the Arista switches were awesome to play with.

So the cool thing about that is I can personally vouch for the existence of space travel, because I build computer systems which use NTP, which depends on space travel in the form of GPS satellites, or expensive atomic clocks which are bulky, and which in the case of New Jersey, took up 4U of rackspace (each unit was 2U, or 3.5”, tall, and a rack has 42U of space, each U being 1.75”), which we could have used for other things. In a typical datacenter you run out of power or have cooling issues before you run out of rackspace, but here we had sufficient power and cooling for a maximum density deployment, and that datacenter space and bandwidth was expensive; you could buy a new car with their monthly bill, but they were making enough to buy several ferraris a month for a time. But most of my clients who need high precision time keeping use a GPS receiver and back that up by talking to stratum 2 NTP servers, and this is economical and works well, and its cheap enough where you can actually put one in every computer. In fact, most client devices have them these days. So every time you use navigation on your smartphone, you are talking to spacecraft! This would all be science fiction as recently as 1980.

Back in the day The Church had to deal with Arian priests and bishops.

Today The Church has to deal with masonic and illuminist shill priests and bishops.

.

The Liturgist · Mar 15, 2021

Jude1:3Contendforthefaith said:
Back in the day The Church had to deal with Arian priests and bishops.

Today The Church has to deal with masonic and illuminist shill priests and bishops.

.

So any priest who disagrees with you is a secret Freemason or a member of the Illuminati?

Dude, seriously, what jurisdiction are you in, and are you a cradle Orthodox or a convert?

Also, you did not respond to my explanation. Just repeating yourself without bothering to reply to what I have to say is not nice or charitable. St. Paul commands us to be charitable. Therefore I beseech you to read and reply to my response.

Petros2015 · Mar 15, 2021

You might enjoy Lewis's take on the question, I did

RickReads · Mar 15, 2021

parousia70 said:
Ive been hanging around this eschatology forum for 19 years and I honestly can’t tell the difference.

I've seen a lot of religious people make light of the so-called alien phenomenon

RickReads · Mar 15, 2021

It will one day turn into the most serious challenge to Christian belief there has ever been.

Petros2015 · Mar 15, 2021

RickReads said:
It will one day turn into the most serious challenge to Christian belief there has ever been.

Only if they turn out not to be Christians

parousia70 · Mar 15, 2021

RickReads said:
It will one day turn into the most serious challenge to Christian belief there has ever been.

The public dissemination of the knowledge of extra terrestrial, sentient societies that have visited earth for Millennia?
I would agree.

RickReads · Mar 15, 2021

Petros2015 said:
Only if they turn out not to be Christians

The world hates Christianity and is violently hostile to it. Nothing to joke about.

RickReads · Mar 15, 2021

parousia70 said:
The public dissemination of the knowledge of extra terrestrial, sentient societies that have visited earth for Millennia?
I would agree.

Evil is the only thing that will come from it.

Petros2015 · Mar 15, 2021

RickReads said:
The world hates Christianity and is violently hostile to it. Nothing to joke about.

Surely this isn't a surprise...?

John 15:18
18 If the world hates you, understand that it hated Me first. 19 If you were of the world, it would love you as its own. Instead, the world hates you, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world.

RickReads said:
The world hates Christianity and is violently hostile to it.

You are assuming that all worlds followed the same path if there was alien life on them; there may be worlds that didn't. Time will tell.

RickReads · Mar 15, 2021

Petros2015 said:
Surely this isn't a surprise...?

John 15:18
18 If the world hates you, understand that it hated Me first. 19 If you were of the world, it would love you as its own. Instead, the world hates you, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world.

You are assuming that all worlds followed the same path if there was alien life on them; there may be worlds that didn't. Time will tell.

I have warned so all who read my words are without excuse. God has promised the universe to hisn elect

Petros2015 · Mar 15, 2021

Alexa! "All your base are belong to us!"

RickReads · Mar 15, 2021

Petros2015 said:
Alexa! "All your base are belong to us!"

Goofy remarks will not save you. Believe Jesus is Christ.

Petros2015 · Mar 15, 2021

RickReads said:
Goofy remarks will not save you. Believe Jesus is Christ.

I do; I suspect I just feel differently about it than you do.

RickReads · Mar 15, 2021

Petros2015 said:
I do; I suspect I just feel differently about it than you do.

If we both believe Jesus is the Christ then we are one.

Petros2015 · Mar 15, 2021

Did you listen to the Lewis essay I posted a few comments prior? You might enjoy it and understand my perspective a little better. He is a classic Christian apologist.

parousia70 · Mar 15, 2021

RickReads said:
The world hates Christianity and is violently hostile to it. Nothing to joke about.

And yet God Loves it. John 3:16

If God Loves the World, that's good enough for me. I love anything that God Loves.

Petros2015 · Mar 15, 2021

parousia70 said:
I love anything that God Loves.

I presume he loves Alpha Centauri as well, pretty sure that's one of His too
If He does, I don't feel any less loved for it.
Love isn't a zero-sum game with God

Implications of humans making deal with aliens

Well-Known Member

Traditional Liturgical Christian

Well-Known Member

Traditional Liturgical Christian

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Livin' in yesterday's tomorrow

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Livin' in yesterday's tomorrow

Well-Known Member

Similar threads

Privacy & Transparency

Privacy & Transparency