The closest star to our planet is 4.2 light years away. Let’s assume life exists there, and they have ships advanced enough to fly ten times the speed of light. That means it would still take them over five months to get here. Even for a four-man (-being?) crew, you’re looking at stocking lots of food and water (or equivalent sustenance) for such a long trip, meaning the ship is going to need a sizable cargo hold (whether for stored goods or a garden). Then you need more space for propulsion unit.

This rules out the small UFOs most people claim to see as alien in nature. If they traveled through wormholes or jump gates, folded space, or traveled via some other sci-fi cliche, how is it we can spot the energy signatures of gamma-ray bursts in remote galaxies, but not something local to our solar system?

Not to mention the time and energy investment involved. They’re going to come all that way to buzz an airfield, make crop circles, probe a redneck, and fly home?

Yeah. Still not buying it.

Or so I thought.

It stuns me that these things still happen. Most people of faith can reconcile science and psychology with their beliefs and move on with their lives. Unfortunately whackjobs like this make them look bad. As far as I’m concerned, these people are no different from the pinheads who kill albinos for their magic, sacrifice goats to fix airplanes, or marry their daughters off to frogs.

At least this kid lived through his ordeal. Another boy died, and police rescued a young girl as her own grandfather strangled her.

Welcome to progress, people. This is your modern world.

First up, diseases are a common problem in the modern world. Sure, we’ve made many advances and have eliminated things like smallpox, but we still have to deal with the occasional outbreak. Most societies deal with this through immunizations and vaccines, as well as prevent the spread of disease through hygiene, germ cleansers, and in extreme cases, quarantine.

That’s just not good enough in the backwater villages of India. How do they deal with it? They marry their daughters off to frogs. Yeah, that’s going to end well.

Next time I catch pneumonia, I’ll marry the Little Bird off to a hamster. Fix me right up.

In our second entry, we’re drawing closer and closer to the dreaded 2012 apocalypse as predicted by the Maya. There have been books and TV shows devoted to the date, and theories abound as to what the world-destroying event could actually be.

Putting aside the failure to learn a lesson from Y2K hysteria and the fact that the date is just a nice round number in the Mayan calendar (just like 2000 on our Gregorian calendar), has anyone stopped to realize they’re worried about predictions from people who practiced human sacrifice to appease their gods?

They needed rain, they sacrificed people. They needed more crops, they sacrificed people. They needed the sun to come up the next morning, they sacrificed people. I’m just not going to get myself too worked up over the last page of a calender worked out by some assholes who’d cut my heart out as an insurance policy for reaching that last page.

Makes me wonder if we’re really making any progress after all.

The first question a rational human being asks is “why not wear a helmet?” Good question. The first reason is because they’re afraid the helmets will be stolen. This is especially problematic for the motorcyclists who use their bikes as a taxi to get people through the insane Nigerian traffic; the drivers claim they get to the destination and the passenger runs off with the helmet, which costs $29US. That may not sound like a lot, but consider they only make about fifty cents a ride.

Okay, fair enough. What else?

I know some bikers who don’t wear helmets, and their arguments include: helmets restrict vision; helmets dampen hearing; helmets are uncomfortable; you don’t get to feel the wind in the face; forcing helmets on us hampers personal freedom.

Not a big deal in Nigeria. No, it’s their next concern that makes them a prime candidate for a Your Modern World entry:

Stories have also appeared in the local papers highlighting passengers’ fears that the helmets could be used by motorcyclists to cast spells on their clients, making it easy for them to be robbed.

“Some people can put juju inside the helmets and when they are worn the victim can either lose consciousness or be struck dumb,” passenger Kolawole Aremu told the Daily Trust newspaper.

Yes, you read that right: they’re afraid of magic!

I would kill to see ABATE present that argument to the state legislature.

We’ve split the atom, condensed the sum total of human knowledge onto silicon chips, and have shot satellites into the depths of space, yet a significant portion of the world’s population is still living in the Dark Ages. There may be parts of some cities I wouldn’t walk through at night, but at least I don’t have to live in fear of marauders hacking my legs off with machetes because they want to mix up some potion or another.

Yeah, I’m glad most of us have put superstition and magic behind us. Modern societies just don’t have room for — oh, wait… never mind.

Now, I can understand the thought popping into his head. I once heard a thunk in my car and thought it might be a bomb (which, 13 years later, still amuses my wife to no end). How, though, do you hold on to this thought for more than a few seconds and not laugh about it? Let’s just assume for a moment that the aliens are out there. What does this guy do for a living that might make him a target? What could he possibly have done that could rouse their ire? Maybe they’re just doing it for the giggles, like some cosmic meatspace version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster game.

Even better is he’s reinforced the roof of his house to protect himself. Does this mean he thinks he’s safe if he’s having a beer at the local pub? Or if he checks into a hotel room every time it rains? Rather than spend all that money, why not just move? If the meteorites follow him to his new house, then it might be worth entertaining the notion of intelligent guidance behind the meteorites.

I can’t help but laugh at the image of him hiding under a table every time it rains. It makes me wonder what else he’s doing about it, like holding a rifle across his lap and shooting back when a new meteorite hits. We should put him in touch with Troy Hurtubise so they can turn the Angel Light into a superweapon and mount it on an Ursus Bearsuit to battle the aliens. Or at the very least he should file a grievance with the Vogons.

Shifting from the extraterrestrial to the divine, there’s a story in India about a girl born with two faces. Obviously that means she’s a reincarnated goddess. People from neighboring villages are already worshiping her as such, and the parents will not allow doctors to give the girl a CT scan.

I love it. When a goat is born with two faces or a cat is born with one eye, it’s a deformity. At the very least, superstitious or religious (pick your poison) folk will call it a curse or a bad omen. When it happens to a child, though? She’s a goddess! Can’t go tying bad mojo to our precious little babies! “Misfortune and mutation my ass, it’s a blessing!” As with all things religious, it’s all so arbitrary and convenient.

Taken together, these are a good example of how quickly people turn to paranormal or supernatural explanations for things they don’t understand. It doesn’t matter that one guy lives in a modern culture and the others in a Third World village; they both jump to extreme conclusions.

Welcome to your modern world.

Brovetto and Maxia hypothesise that the changes in the brain that occur at puberty involve fluctuations in electron activity that, in rare cases, can create disturbances up to a few metres around the outside of the brain.

These disturbances would be similar in character to the quantum mechanical fluctuations that physicists believe occur in the vacuum, in which “virtual” particle and antiparticle pairs pop up for a fleeting moment, before they annihilate each other and disappear again.

Brovetto and Maxia believe that the extra fluctuations triggered by the pubescent brain would substantially enhance the presence of the virtual particles surrounding the person. This could slowly increase the pressure of air around them, moving objects and even sending them hurtling across the room.

I love it! Straight out of comic book science. If this were real, these guys would take the top spot on my crackpot list.

Then along come people like Wally Wallington. He’s rebuilding Stonehenge by hand, using nothing more than wood and rocks. Who’s to say the same or similar principles weren’t used to build the pyramids? Just because we can’t figure it out doesn’t mean they couldn’t.

Lack of evidence is not evidence itself.

In more modern times, some propeller heads also figured out how to better convert radiation to electricity using nanomaterials. This, too, is something that would have been unfathomable a century ago, and something we couldn’t yet pull off in the 1960’s. That doesn’t automatically mean we must have reverse-engineered it from Roswell wreckage.

Yes, people as a whole are stupid and ignorant. However, it only takes a few visionaries to come up with something great.

I was in the mood for a laugh, so I snapped one up. It turns out for twenty bucks, I too can join the search for little green men in flying saucers. I wonder if there’s a membership card and a secret handshake. I’m half tempted to join just so I can find out if the majority of the membership is comprised of Stanton Friedman types or if they’re just your garden variety, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling dweebs. (One may may be indistinguishable from the other from a distance, but at least you can hold a conversation with someone like Mr. Friedman.)

While it does make sense to me that there could be life on other planets, perhaps even (now or in the past) on other planets in our own solar system, I find most people are too quick to assign extraterrestrial origins to anything they can’t otherwise explain.

For example, an ex-governor of Arizona claims he spotted a UFO. The article has the following quote:

“As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I’d ever seen.”

That’s often enough for most people to tag him as an expert on the subject. However, when was his Air Force experience? What was his job? What was his security clearance? Engineers can conceivably be working on all kinds of strange and unusual technologies that he wouldn’t be privy to.

Consider the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. I don’t doubt when it was first under development, many pilots would never have recognized it, much less your average Joe who spotted it flying high overhead. I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of UFO reports could now be attributed to the B-2. In fact, some say many of today’s UFO sightings may be attributable to the hypothetical Aurora or other deltoid aircraft with exotic propulsion systems like external burn.

Are there unexplainable events out there? Sure. But does that automatically make them the result of visiting aliens? Of course not.

2,000 years ago, people thought the Earth was flat. They explained things they couldn’t understand as the work of gods and monsters, including things like thunderstorms, which we now take for granted. They thought tornadoes and hurricanes were divine punishment (hell, we still refer to them as “acts of God”) rather than natural weather phenomena. People today have a much better grasp on science, however, so they instead conjure up science-based strangeness to explain the unexplainable. They replace Zeus and Hera with Martians and Greys.

On another side of it, the UFO chasers are very much a cult. I think so many of them so badly want to believe that they latch on to anything they can’t easily explain and call it alien rather than fully investigating the object or event in question. The Haitian UFO video is a perfect example of people disregarding the obvious because it contradicts their faith.

How odd it is to see a hybrid of faith and science when the two are so often mutually exclusive. Does anyone else think it’s funny that both divine creation and alien genetic engineering both site a Missing Link as a proof? They can’t both be right, and something that simply may not have been found yet is a flimsy piece of evidence anyway.

So I think I’ll take a pass on joining the great space cult. While UFO’s, extraterrestrial life, and spacecraft are, and always will remain, a fascinating subject for me, I’m not sure there’s such a big difference between alien abduction claims and the Virgin Mary appearing as a water stain.

Congrats to Automattic, creators of the bestest blog software on the planet (WordPress), for landing $29 million in funding. Not too shabby for a product that’s being given away for free. And they say Open Source doesn’t work. Ha! Version 2.5 already sounds delicious.

A man got through a TSA checkpoint in an airport, realized he still had his gun on him, and went back to report it. The TSA goon squad promptly arrested him. Lesson learned? If this happens to you, keep your mouth shut. They suspended the screener who let the man through for the investigation, but I don’t understand why the man’s arrest was bigger news than the TSA failure. Yes, he tried to make good on his mistake. But look at it this way: in some states it is legal to carry a firearm, but illegal to carry that firearm onto school grounds. If I were legal to carry and walked into work with my gun, I’m sure I’d be arrested whether or not I told the principal “oops!” ahead of time.

A mysterious blob is clogging sewer drains in Maine (found via Boing Boing). Maybe it’s The Stuff. Run for your lives, Mainers!