Mr. Gullible

Let’s face it:
Today we don’t live in the future we (or our parents) envisioned. Civilization was not eliminated or at least decimated by a nuclear war – at least not yet. TV hasn’t dumbed down all of society as predicted. But we also didn’t get our flying cars and there is definitely no big space station shaped like a wheel in earth orbit from which deep space missions are launched (as in 2001). I guess it’s a trade-off. In our everyday life we use so many things our parents never even imagined one could possibly have a need for. And maybe it’s a good thing those flying cars didn’t come out, they might be pretty dangerous under human control.

The reason the Moon is as far as humans went has become obvious lately: The race to the Moon was not about science but it was to show the Soviets and all the world that the US could do it. Considering that all the resources, manpower and money that went into that effort wasn’t spent on weapons was a good thing already. Maybe people started to think that there was so much good technology for everybody in the pipeline that they turned to SF and Fantasy when the goodies didn’t materialize. I guess our ancestors were used to gradual or no change in someone’s lifetime. The 20th century had so many projects and developments that were deemed impossible when proposed and then led to the wildest blooms. Aviation is probably one. At the same time human flight didn’t exactly start with the Wright brothers in the early 1900’s. The wish to fly seems to have been in human consciousness long before that. So, patience.

A little update might be in order:
Just a few days ago US president Obama canceled the Constellation program. This program was very much focused on going back to the Moon. It remains to be seen what happens now. It is hoped that private companies like SpaceX could provide launch capacity soon. Maybe that means that Bob Zubrin’s Mars Direct plan gets a closer look. Or how about Marshall T. Savage’s Millenium Project?

When in the 1960s and 70s technology seemed to jump forward with new inventions and discoveries practically every week, with the crown of course being the first manned landing on the Moon by Apollo 11, it looked like it would only be a short two decades until we would have humans live in a  permanent Moon base and we would reach Mars shortly thereafter. Assuming that the movie 2001 by Stanley Kubrick tried to reflect the honest expectations of technology minded people we would have a mission to Jupiter on the way by that year. There was no doubt that the Space Shuttle might be the beginning of cheap access to space and people would soon move into giant space habitats as envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill. Of course nuclear power had come out of favor in the 70s after an accident at Three Mile Island and even more so after Chernobyl in 1986. Surely the nuclear arms race between the two super powers contributed its share. But for the optimistic technologists nuclear fusion was just around the corner – fusion power was also of course the energy source many SF authors based their spaceship propulsions on.

SF literature eagerly foresaw easy space travel aboard huge and quite comfortable vehicles. Encounters with countless alien races were described – sometimes humans were enslaved or driven into the underground often they prevailed (due to their ingenuity or unintended actions). Sometimes they even made friends with the aliens. Encounters with aliens presumed that travel between stars was possible. Ways had to be invented of how to travel many lightyears in reasonable timeframes (without the effects of time dilation). Although there were stories which made time dilation their theme (Poul Anderson – Starfarers). The other type of long distance space travel was done in so-called generation ships – whole societies living on huge star ships, on their merry way at sub light speeds for many generations. Also one German SF series which has been appearing in weekly pulp booklets since 1961 called Perry Rhodan was practically expanding the human empire by thousands of lightyears every week. About four years into the series humans had already traveled back in time to meet their ancestors and were traveling to Andromeda, the closest neighboring galaxy, in about as much time it took Apollo 11 to get to the Moon and back. Funny enough all this was done with cryptic computers printing out course directions on punch cards. The robots of course were as intelligent as needed. And really, this brings me to…..

….computers. When I grew up in the late 60s and early 70s computers were these ominous machines in big buildings that had to be ‘fed’ with punch cards (aha!), only to be operated by experts. I saw the very first computer in person at a friend’s house in Germany in late 1981 – a Commodore PET. Only two years later I bought my very own first computer – a Commodore 64. In early 2010 I am writing this on an iMac, which runs about 3,000 times faster than the C64 and has 64,000 times the RAM, while I listen to music streaming through iTunes and the computer crunches numbers for SETI@home and Einstein@home. Officially 2010 will be the year the US Space Shuttle will be retired after almost 30 years. No human has gone back to the Moon after Apollo 17 returned in December of 1972. We have put a space telescope in orbit (the Hubble) and started building the International Space Station in 1998 which will be completed this year. NASA has launched a good number of highly successful unmanned missions to Mars and the outer planets – and a few not so successful ones. But where is all the space stuff we were promised 30 years ago?

I have often wondered what would happen if we could start over with something. For example language. Let’s say we wind back time to the beginning of the development of language – assuming, for the moment, there is such a thing as a starting point. If we let it run again from that moment how would it develop? Would it develop pretty much along the same lines? Totally different?

Now, take something like Mathematics. Push the RESET button. Do we expect the exact science of Mathematics to develop the same way it did? Maybe it will develop along different ways but still end up with the same formulas, constants, rules, etc. One would expect the latter if Mathematics is as universal as it is usually made out to be. Wouldn’t we feel utterly betrayed if somehow these RESET mathematicians came up with a consistent, workable and applicable system that is totally different from ours?

Think of a house. Over its lifetime the owner will put on a new roof. Floors might be ripped out, walls torn down. Additions might be built. A second floor added on. When you get to the thought of adding passive and active energy savings measures such as insulation, windows that reflect the sunlight at just the right time of the year and let the light through at other times, solar panels? geothermal heating & cooling? – you get the idea – one might find that the original dwelling was built at a very odd angle to the sun that doesn’t allow easy usage of sunlight. You might find out that there is not enough room to run the water pipes from a roof installation of solar hot water panels – the rafters might be too weak to carry the weight anyhow. There comes a point when the owner realizes that if she really wants go ahead with all the upgrades it would be much more efficient to start over. Tear the old house down and build a new one – doing it right this time.

Another interesting target for such speculations is the wide field of Physics. Especially Theoretical Physics. This is a field which interests me tremendously yet I must admit my actual understanding of the whole thing is pitiful. I tend to read these really cool articles in Scientific American and various other magazines. While I read I go “Yeah, right. I get it this time. Makes total sense.” But as soon as I am supposed to tell somebody else in my own words what the article was about I can’t put it back together. What is probably the most outlandish aspect of it is that it’s all so small. Not only can’t we see any of the quarks, leptons, let alone force carriers such as photons. Somehow all of that seems so removed and irrelevant to our everyday lives. And yet the interactions between all these different forces and particles produce our reality. What if we press RESET for Theoretical Physics? One would imagine that while we don’t know how, when and by whom various effects would be discovered and what language would be used to express this knowledge there still would be someone to figure out the theory behind electromagnetism (James Clerk Maxwell did it in our reality). You would think that somebody would eventually uncover E=mc squared although we don’t know what mathematics she would use to describe it. Could it be that the building of Theoretical Physics might be constructed in a different order and thereby would actually come out differently? Impossible, you say, physics describes the underlying rules of reality but maybe our physics only describe the tip of a huge iceberg. RESET physics and another tip of the iceberg might be sticking out of the water.

One subject of interest to me is music. How could music develop differently after a total RESET? (Assuming of course that music would actually develop in the first place.) Since music is a subject I have a bit more expertise I want to offer an idea I have been elaborating on for a few years now. Assuming a piece of music – for the moment this could be one of the simpler, shorter and clearly structured compositions of J. S. Bach – we know what theoretical background it comes from. We know the key, the meter, how the melody relates to the bass notes, how the notes in between create a harmonic movement. We know how, through the circle of fifths, the major and minor keys relate to each other. Seemingly the composition of the piece is more or less an application of general rules mixed with personal preferences on the musical raw material which has been fine-tuned and formalized over hundreds of years. So, now assume that some alien digs out a recording of that piece. No other materials are found. No reference points to what culture that music came from. The piece of music clearly has structure. It clearly works according to certain rules. But which rules? Can the alien figure out by that piece of music alone what the underlying system of rules and customs that led to its composition were? Could it actually be that this alien might come up with a totally different underlying system for the creation of the piece? I guess if these aliens find more music they will develop a better and better handle on what concepts it’s based upon. Or really? Maybe after a piece of music has been composed or created in some way it’s roots are best forgotten. On the other hand I wonder if it could stand all by itself, apart from the culture that brought it forth.

Finally, for part 1 of this train of thought, think how science actually developed over thousands of years from mythology, religion, superstition, etc. People wanted to know. What knowledge they didn’t have they filled in – by connecting the visible dots, consequently ignoring countless little details in between. Obviously nowadays we know much more about the details in between the dots. And much of it actually seems to be correct since we can use the theories we came up with and reliably predict how certain things in reality will behave. We use these theories to work out what will happen if we put together two chemicals in specific quantities We use them to calculate how to construct rockets to deliver satellites into space and figure out where to put them so they appear to stay over the same geographical location all the time. We use them to program the algorithms that let our GPS navigation systems use these satellites to guide us through big city jungles of one-way streets. So the theories we have work on various chunks of reality. None so far seems to pull it all together. There are still dots hidden and one wonders if in a RESET reality other dots might be found first.

After listening to the 11/23/2008 episode of Tim Harold’s  Paranormal Podcast featuring an interview with Stanton T. Friedman I had some more thoughts about the relationship of the UFO phenomenon with Science.

I want to say upfront that while I more often than not highly disagree with Tim Harold’s guests he is an excellent interviewer who somehow manages to keep a straight face (or tone of voice) while his guests tell the most outlandish stuff. I have heard Mr. Friedman interviewed on other shows before, I have checked out his website and viewed some of his video material on youtube. While I actually agree with him and many other ‘fringe’ or paranormal people that there might be more to a certain phenomenon than current scientific knowledge can explain I find the way they on one hand condemn scientists, universities and research in many fields when it contradicts their ideas while on the other hand eagerly striving to be scientific themselves to be a little inconsistent. Alright, I think I understand where they are coming from. People like Stanton Friedman used to work in a scientific field. They believe the stuff they research now is for real, too. What struck me with that particular interview was that Mr. Friedman spent a whole hour telling how close-minded scientists are when the subject of UFOs comes up. He specifically mentioned Brian Dunning, who produces the excellent Skeptoid podcast. I have listened to every episode of Skeptoid. I find them well reasoned, thoroughly researched and occasionally disturbing (I am a vegetarian and the episode about organically grown food didn’t go down easy.) Mr. Friedman also mentioned Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute who produces a podcast called ‘Are we alone’. The SETI Institute listens for intelligent signals from outer space (remember the movie ‘Contact’?) The podcast deals with scientific topics around that. I have learned much about robotics, astrobiology, physics, etc. listening to that show. Stanton Friedman called the search for extraterrestrial life a ‘religion’.

When I found out about podcasting I was surprised how many science shows there were. Scientific American offers two podcasts. Groks Science Radio Show is a great podcast with different guests each week. Not to forget The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, Skepticality, Geologic Podcast, Quirks and Quarks. There are many more but they don’t all fit on my iPod. The days are too short to catch them all. All of them have one thing in common: I actually learn something from them. And they actually talk about real things, or sometimes hypothetical things. It’s about stuff that has something to do with my reality. The people on these shows are not whining about not being accepted by the general science community (probably because their research has passed the peer review process?) Funny, too, when they talk about the fringe stuff (at least they do on the skeptics’ shows) the consensus is that if there was a real flying saucer or compelling evidence for ESP or life after death scientists wouldn’t hesitate to probe the subject in depth. Anyway, to make it short: podcasts or TV documentaries, books or magazine articles dealing with UFOs have often been about how serious scientists ignore the evidence for alien visitation accompanied by a few blurry or inconclusive photos, and the demand that more research needs to be done (and that the US government must release all the secret documents pertaining the Roswell incident.) I haven’t really learned anything new or conclusive from the UFO guys. And it’s not that anybody prevents people like Stanton Friedman from producing their own weekly podcast. I might actually tune in, in search for new information but for some reason I think it might be a bit repetitive after a few episodes when the reality I live in somehow turns out to have no relationship with what they talk about on the show. It just doesn’t hold much water to see a light in the sky and to extrapolate from that observation that grey aliens and reptilians are at war, etc. I know it’s oversimplified but my call goes out to the UFO folks: If you have real things to report about then produce your own podcast and convince me with compelling evidence.

Around 1976, back in Albstadt, Germany, I heard about UFOs for the first time. Being interested in all things space I immediately took to it. There wasn’t a lot of information available but I managed to write a short paper about the topic for a class in Gymnasium. I did get an 1+ for it which corresponds to an A+. The paper was pretty critical about the whole thing. There was just not enough information to make up one’s mind.

Then in 1978 I saw my one and only UFO on a night hike a few kilometers from my mother’s house in the woods. It was a light, hovering in the air like a helicopter some distance off over a valley. The thing that was strange was that there was no sound. There is a military practice grounds pretty close by and we were all familiar with the various sounds and sights from the different flying contraptions used in the practice. Seeing airplanes or helicopters at night was pretty common. My sighting happened during a clear and cold night in November. No crickets. Germans go to bed early. No cars on the road where I was walking. Dead silence. I think even at a distance of several kilometers I should have heard some sound. There was no wind. But for some reason, while I wished for it to be a spaceship that would pick me up, nothing much happened. I could see that mysterious light for 30 minutes or so as I was looking over my shoulder while walking back home. I lost sight of it for maybe 15 minutes until I went to the living room window of our apartment on the 6th floor. The light was still there. Moving about a little. When nothing further happened I went to bed. A good camera would have been nice.

A true Unidentified Flying Object. I don’t know what it was. At the same time jumping to the conclusion that it was an alien spaceship seems a bit far fetched. Other people have been taking this subject much more seriously. Since, in 1947, Kenneth Arnold reported his famous ‘saucer’ it developed its own mythology. There are UFO believers, UFO skeptics, UFO researchers and books, movies and documentaries dealing with the subject. There are claims, people who honestly think they saw something or were even abducted, fraud, faked photographs and videos, books full of unchecked, anecdotal stories. I don’t personally have an opinion about it other than people seeing something and jumping to conclusions. In the small cracks of our reality there are quite possibly countless things we don’t know about yet which together might turn the image we have about that reality upside down many times over. While I don’t know if there is other conscious life out there on some planet or if Earth is actually the only place in the known Universe bearing life my personal feeling is that we are not alone. However, what this other life looks like and how far away from Earth it developed is another question. The assumption that beings from another world have, or are visiting Earth has been been investigated for over a century by science fiction in written and later filmed form. In the written variety of science fiction one can find fantastic aliens, truly different. At the same time many alien cultures depicted appear almost ‘human’. Skipping to SciFi (the cinematic form of science fiction) popular TV series like Star Trek have a long history of depicting beings from other worlds. Most of these have more with us in common than Eskimos with Australian aborigines. Alright, they tend to have different foreheads. In many of the classic SciFi movies aliens – who often look just like us – visit Earth in their flying saucers. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some cross breeding of ideas going on. When the expression ‘flying saucers’ came up it was quickly adopted by movie makers as the obvious form for alien spaceships. And then people who saw something in the sky they couldn’t explain had an easy label to put on their observation. Herein of course lies the rub: UFOs in older photos or videos mostly look like hubcaps and lamps as do UFOs in movies made at that time. It’s hard to tell a real UFO photo or video from all the fakery, fraud and prank. And then don’t forget that UFO means Unidentified Flying Object but when people say they saw a UFO they usually do mean an alien space ship. The well is poisoned as in other ‘paranormal’ stuff such as ESP, near death experiences, ghosts, etc. It seems we try to impose archetypical explanations, thousands of years old, on a very thin layer of actual data. By the time a report of some paranormal activity actually goes on record the actual experience has been blurred, interpreted and totally mutated out of proportion and any sensible inspection is futile.

Perhaps there is stuff going on. Things our senses can’t really pick up because our eyes only see a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum and our ears have a pretty limited frequency band and range. Our mind (or brain, consciousness, whatever) uses all these inputs to fabricate the image of our reality from these inputs. That’s a pretty complicated task come to think of it. It doesn’t seem at all far fetched that small fluctuations in an input stream might trigger funny interpretations. There might be a lot more fluctuations on a small scale than our crude senses can perceive. Atoms are quite small and it takes a lot of them to form any visible structures. The overused but effective comparison with what you see on your computer screen comes to mind. You don’t think about all the electronic components involved in showing a youtube video in your web browser. One dead pixel on your LCD screen may not have too much of an impact but you do notice when a hard drive starts acting up or a virus or malfunctioning system extension spoils your experience.

Before any labels are put on anything we need to make sure that there actually is something to put a label on. So we are really dealing with two big problems:

1) sort the ‘actual’ physical phenomena taking place outside of the observer, from imaginations, deliberate fakes and other artifacts

If there are actual physical effects provoking observations which then get interpreted as UFOs its signal-noise-ration is very narrow. It may be even harder to come up with a good theoretical framework for these effects than it is in traditional physics because there is hardly anything to build a theory from. And it seems literally out of this world to base the gigantic theories surrounding alien interference in Earth matters on such thin data.

2) drop our preconceptions of what these phenomena might be, follow the data

Forming preconceptions is a human thing and it helps our minds to create the ‘inner’ picture of reality by drawing on previous experiences and acquired knowledge. At the same time, once we have a deep enough storage of preconceptions we tend to apply these first to make sense of what our senses pick up.

UFO and aliens in Legoland

Ok. After building a greenscreen in my basement, enlisting my kids as actors, digging deeper into Final Cut Express, Toon Boom Studio and a few other applications I noticed that I still would need some “authentic” footage to put together a video about UFOs. Luckily there is youtube which is full of obscure (and not so obscure) footage from various sources. That it still took me over six weeks to fabricate this not quite four minute piece of *your pick here* is a testament to my stellar inability in all involved skills. To add insult to injury I don’t know which movies or documentaries most of the youtube footage came from. And since this video is actually a music video featuring the tune “Call the Police” from my new CD Peter’s Money I thought it might be appropriate to send a free CD to the first person to identify a certain clip used in the video.

So:

1) Can you identify the original movie or documentary a certain clip came from?

2) There are four distinct short musical quotes from well known movies or TV series in the song (actually they roughly correspond with the visuals….) – do you know the source of these?

If you know one, please, post the time when the clip/sound appears (minutes/seconds) and what movies, TV series, documentary it is from right here in this topic. Please, only one answer per post although post as many as you want. Whoever identifies the material first gets a free CD but should refrain from posting more answers. Just to give everybody a chance.

Here’s the video from youtube

'Call the Police' screen shot

My wife actually got me a set of LEGO Mindstorms for my birthday. I am done buying guitars. For those who don’t know what Mindstorms are:
These are LEGO Technic (not the blocks but the parts that let you build all sorts of vehicles, airplanes, cranes, robots – probably guitars if you push it). The set comes with a few motors, sensors and a small computer which holds programs that control whatever robot – or thing – you build.

Here’s the musical analogy part:
As I am toying around with this I realize that having all the hundreds of parts in one big box really slows things down. Especially finding these very small pins takes time. On a trip to the hardware store I bought a few compartmentalized boxes people use to hold screws and other small stuff on their work benches and then I sorted all parts out and now I can find them quickly.

Somehow that whole process of learning what actually to do with this stuff reminded me of learning about jazz.

1) you start with a big, unsorted box of LEGOs

2) you put together small things from a few blocks to see how it works

3) you look at existing models and try to copy them

4) you start getting a little experience, what parts you can use for which job

5) you start organizing parts so you don’t always have to search in the big box

6) you become aware of what you actually CAN build with what you have

7) you organize your LEGOs in various compartmentalized boxes

8) you develop a ‘style’, things you like to built

9) you start re-using subsections you developed

10) your perception of what you CAN and WANT to build is intimately connected to how you organized the components

11) over time you might actually store pieces you NEVER use in a separate box

blah, blah

This could go on and on. From my perspective this is pretty much how we learn to improvise. Seems the main thing is to not sort our parts too much. You want to keep access to the big, unsorted box of ideas.

I guess I am getting old and a bit bored by ‘what scale goes over what chord’.

Since I was a kid a had a fascination with rockets, spaceships and other BIG stuff. I loved the Saturn V rocket. But the crawler, the huge vehicle carrying it from the assembly complex to the launch pad, and the gantry did it for me. This fascination with BIG hardware is what sucked me into Science Fiction and stuff like the Culture universe of Iain Banks. Here you are talking about space ships 30km long. I mean, that’s from Martinsville to Indianapolis! And then there are the ‘orbitals’. Giant rings, 10 million kilometers in diameter, consisting of a string of plates each a thousand km square. Of course the Culture has all sorts of machines and robotic equipment for their building needs – and I guess a few thousand years of experience.

A few years ago, after our second daughter Jasmin was born, our house started to get crammed. Instead of selling it and buying a larger one we decided to build a simple addition. Just an extra two rooms on the north side of the house. No plumbing, no gas lines. Just like this:

Old house

New house

After finding a contractor we finally broke ground in July of 2003. Those were exciting times. Daily videos of the progress were made.
After a week the concrete foundation had settled and the frame for the basement went up. Day by day you could see it grow. After three weeks or so both floors were framed and the roof was covered. At that time I thought it would only be another few weeks until we could move into the new rooms. But little did I know how long hanging drywall would take. Upgrading the power connection to the house, installing electrical wires, light fixtures. Painting took forever. I wasn’t aware that they would stain the new doors right there in our basement. Hardwood floors. By November it was totally normal for us to share our limited living space with the contractor’s people – and then, five months after breaking ground, it was finished. I admit I had not appreciated all the planning and various steps of execution involving backhoes, concrete trucks, carpenters, roofers, gutterers, drywall-hangers, electricians, painters and a building inspector.

And then, this summer, it was time to do something about our old rusty garden shed. We needed a dry space for the mower, four bikes and other stuff that is crowding our basement. After the old shed had been picked up for scrap metal I decided on a wooden 10×10 foot shed. Nothing fancy. A kit with all necessary parts. At first I thought about pouring a concrete foundation but my friend Dave quickly talked me out of that – water coming down the hill during a heavy rain might flood the concrete slab. Wooden posts would lift the structure above ground so that any water was able to pass underneath. Keep in mind now that I have never done anything like that before. I can repair my amps, program in a bunch of computer languages and I write pretty decent jazz tunes. But how would I make sure the holes I started to dig at the site were properly lined up so that the posts (16 of them, overkill!) would form a perfect 10×10 square?

Well, I started out by making a 3D model in Cinema 4D to visualize it. After my kids had helped me picking out a shed at the hardware store I had second thoughts – not about quitting but rather about not using a kit which comes with all parts sawed to size but to build my own from scratch. My wife quickly talked me out of that – she knew I would have no time for anything else for the better part of a year and it would probably still come out crooked. In late September I started digging the first hole. I had planned to spend an hour or two a day digging holes for the posts. Once I had started I could see the construction site staring up at me through my office window every time I worked on my computer. What a good motivation for picking up a shovel and dig some more. After about a month I had 16 holes and the six kittens that were born at our house around June started using them as litter boxes. On a Saturday afternoon my friend Dave came over to help me setting the posts. I had bought 20 bags of concrete the day before and with string, stakes and other crude tools we tried to lay our posts out in a nice 10×10 square. That first afternoon we managed to put eight posts in and I did the rest on the following Sunday. A few days went by to let the concrete set then we screwed the boards to the posts. After that I put in some more cross boards for extra floor support. By that time I spent six hours a day out there. When I played gigs in the evening I couldn’t hold the strings down on my guitar because my fingers hurt from pressing the GO button on the screwdriver. The following Saturday the kit arrived in a huge package. Just unpacking all the parts took an afternoon. It’s Thursday now and since three days I have been building frames for the walls. Probably hammered in something like four pounds of nails. Tomorrow my wife and I will try to erect the walls on the site. I am sure it will be fun….

Wait a minute. Why am I telling this story?

Because reading books of the Culture, watching Star Trek and consuming large quantities of Science Fiction in general has distorted my perception of reality. In the future, they make you believe, anything is possible. I mean, people like Stephen Baxter often write about alien races who are able to engineer galaxies according to their whims. That’s great and great fun, too. But it didn’t take rocket science to build that garden shed. Just time and sweat. There are about 32 or so individual parts my foundation is made of (not counting the screws). And despite careful measuring there still were some things that didn’t fit quite right. Nobody’s life depends on the function of this foundation. And yet I have been at it for two months – and it will probably turn out not to be perfectly square.

Now if I look at that gantry for the Saturn V, I don’t think that came as a kit. That was planned and built from scratch. And at a height of around 120m it has a lot more parts than my foundation. And it has to actually work. How much harder is it then to send something to the Moon, to build a human habitat there? Or on Mars? I mean, just getting all the power tools there. Oh wait, you also have to bring your own power outlets (let alone your own air). This stuff isn’t easy. And now I appreciate it more than ever before.

I am a frustrated, castrated, suppressed mathematician, physicist, rocket engineer. I was born in 1960. Ok, Sputnik, was three years earlier. But when in 1968 Apollo 8 traveled around the Moon my granddad had already started giving me science books for birthdays and Christmas. The books about the U.S. space program were my favorites. From that time I have kept many notepads full of childish doodles of spaceships and astronauts.

When, on July 20 1969, just three days before my ninth birthday, Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon I was the only one in my family who staid up late to watch the live broadcast on German TV.  Consequently, I learned all I could about the US space program. I knew all the Astronauts by name and had see-through drawings of the Saturn V internalized. There was no doubt in my mind (and my parents’) that I would become an Astronaut, a rocket engineer or at least a pilot of some sort.

At one point in my teens puberty set in, the last two Apollo missions were canceled and surplus materials used in Skylab and somehow all talk of going to Mars next, or setting up a permanent moon base had gone away. Not only did the first girl I fell in love with not care for me but I was old enough to be asked “So, do you know what you want to be when you grow up?” At that time I started to realize that this question was somehow linked with money. While I had always been interested in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics I just wasn’t able to get good grades in these subjects.

Around age 14, by sheer coincidence, I started playing guitar and just a few months later I played my first gig and got paid for it. Not much but enough to encourage me to pursue music. My interest in science and engineering never went away, With proper guidance I might have finished Gymnasium and gone on to study – University was free in Germany, for crying out loud! But I went the artistic way. I kept some sort of contact with my scientific interests by subscribing to various magazines. TV shows about technology were still my favorites and I developed an appetite for the literature called ‘Science Fiction’. In the course of my late teens and early twenties I drifted away from pure science – while my ex-classmates became doctors, chemists and biologists – and was consuming SF pretty much exclusively. While I actually started supporting myself by teaching guitar lessons and playing gigs and recording sessions every once in while the old science connection stirred in me. But there just didn’t seem to be a way to change professions (in retrospect of course I can see many junctures at which it would have been easy to switch, old people can be so much wiser.)

In 1983 I had my first practical exposure to a real computer. A Commodore 64, when I started to work part time at a friend’s computer store. There the old passion surfaced again. Learning programming, first Basic then Assembly, was such a blast. Again, I could have easily switched careers. At that time computer knowledge was in demand. Again I missed the boat and struggled on as a mediocre musician. At least computers became a big part of my everyday life and that kept the old interest in science and technology alive.

In the mid 80s I started to become interested in more, shall we say, esoteric topics. I had discovered books about past-life regression, reincarnation, UFOs. While I don’t know if I ever really believed any of this I still consumed large quantities of books dealing with these subjects. This phase lasted roughly about 10 years until after I had relocated to the US. Out of a melange of SF books and metaphysical literature I had been reading in that decade came the strange realization that:
#1, somehow there wasn’t much of a difference between the Science Fiction and the books about reincarnation, conspiracies, etc,
#2, the metaphysics books had vastly different and conflicting views from each other about reality and I started wondering where exactly these authors had their information from
#3, I had been an Atheist for most of my life and slowly I came to the conclusion that believing in UFOs and many other ‘unproven’  supernatural claims actually falls in the same category as Religion: You believe because you have faith and not because there is evidence

Within a short few years I started reading pure science books again and started a subscription to Scientific American. And now, as I am working the exercises from the ‘Idiot’s Guide to Geometry’ and am learning about the Scientific Method I realize that I still want to be a Scientist, engineer or something like that.

And that finally brings me to the point of this blather: How can someone who is not a PH.D. contribute to Science? How can you help building a base on the Moon and landing a man on Mars without working for NASA? Ok, I can always contribute money to the Planetary Society or the Mars Society. But that’s not really what I mean (although I am a member). How can I contribute, without being a physicist, an engineer or a billionaire? Are there more people like me out there. People who were very interested in Science for a while and then the needs of a job and family forced them unto a different path?

It now seems to me that one of the biggest things would be a community for people like me. Not quite geniuses and not quite idiots.