BRAIN TAMPERING BY HUMANS AND THE CYGNUS CONSTELLATION

Brain Tampering by Humans and the Cygnus Constellation

    It is quite possible, and we do believe, that we Homo Sapiens have been blessed, and tormented, with the most complex, adaptable, creative, and problem-solving brain in the known universe. We can even understand, date, and manipulate the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that controls it. We also have discovered that it has been improved at least three times by celestial radiation that we have traced to the Cygnus constellation. But let us first sample human tampering.

     Transhumanism is a term used to encompass the beliefs that our race has and can still evolve beyond its current physical and mental capabilities and that we can team up with Artificial Intelligence to enhance and speed up the journey. Today we have world research groups excite and alarm us with knowledge of their progress in developing mind-affecting tools including microscopic electrodes that can be inserted to read and alter DNA activity.

   How helpful or dangerous is this? Can we trust ourselves when it is so evident that we have large influential numbers among us who lack empathy and are blind to current disasters in order to pursue greed to maintain and increase their profits?

     Tampering with human DNA is prohibited by law in over 40 countries, and by a binding Council of Europe international treaty. In non-Western countries controls have been much more lax. In November 2018, at the second International Summit on Human Genome Editing scientific meeting in Hong Kong, Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, revealed he had used CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the DNA of two female twin embryos to make them resistant to HIV. They were born healthy. This has been widely condemned even by China who has ordered a halt to the previously unregulated procedure, but in a country that on a wide scale brainwashes its Muslim Uyghur minority, what assurance do we have that genetic tampering will never be used for ulterior motives? China is a world leader in research, spending in 2018 alone 1.76 trillion yuan (US$254 billion). The USA spent $167 billion in 2018. Many other countries are also pursuing mind altering research. He disappeared but not before tampering with a third woman. CRISPr stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, a family of DNA sequences and enzymes.

     Genome editing promises enormous benefits in eliminating currently incurable diseases but considerable regulated humanitarian research is essential. Critics contend that, in blocking HIV, He Jiankui has deprived the girls of other immunities which will be passed on to future generations.

     Thousands of researcher in hundreds of research universities worldwide were and are employed in brain research. To name a few:

Richard Canton (1842-1926), was a British physician, physiologist and Lord Mayor of Liverpool who was crucial in discovering the electrical nature of the brain. In 1875 he had used a galvanometer to observe electrical impulses from the surfaces of living brain in rabbits and monkeys. Following him was Jans Burger, (1873-1941), a German physicist who, in 1942, invented electroencephalograph (EEG), a means of recording brain waves.

     Founded in 2016 in San Francisco, Elton Musk’s Neuralink Company announces brain-computer interfaces (BCI) with immense, and dangerous, implications. This has already been used on monkeys.

     Research on Brain-Computer Interface started in the 1970s at the University of California. The focus continues to be primarily on neuroprosthetics applications that can help restore damaged sight, hearing, and movement. The mid-1990s saw interface devices used. They require deliberate conscious human thought, while prospective future applications are expected to work effortlessly. Present research is focused on non-invasive BCI, unlike the traditional BCI model that requires implanting a mechanical device in the brain, which then tends to control it as a natural part of the body. BCIs are directed at augmenting,assisting, or repairing sensory-motor or human cognitive functions. They combine technologies from the fields of electrical engineering, computer science, biomedical engineering, and neurosurgery.

  Based on brain imaging technology, such as magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, BCI looks for patterns of activity in the brain in real time.

     In 1998 Philip Kennedy, at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, implanted the first brain computer interface object into a human being using his own brain.

    In 2001 John Donoghue’s team at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, formed Cyberkinetics, to commercially design a brain computer interface called BrainGate. Its first commercial product was NeuroPort which enabled researchers at Columbia University Medical Center, New York, to identify micro-seizure activity prior to epileptic seizures among patients.

     June 2004 marked a significant development in the field when Matthew Nagle became the first human to be implanted with a BCI, Cyberkinetics’s BrainGate.

     In December 2004, Jonathan Wolpaw and researchers at New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center came up with a research report that demonstrated the ability to control a computer using a BCI. Patients wore wear a cap that contained electrodes to capture EEG signals from the motor cortex – part of the cerebellum governing movement. By 2050, BCI could become a magic wand, helping humans control objects with their minds.

     Noted for its excellence in neuroscience, McGill University in Montreal has its dark side when it spent many years working with the USA Central Intelligence Agency on mind control, a study that is still secret. Groundbreaking work at McGill has been done by Wilder Penfield, 1891-1976, who mapped the functions of brain areas and expanded surgery methods, and Donald Hebb who discovered the Hebbian synapse in 1949. “His neurons that fire together wire together” is known as Hebb’s Law. Hebb’s model for the working of the mind led to machines that mimic the biological working a living nervous system.

     One of his students, Brenda Milner, is a founder of the field of clinical neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience.

     Of the 400 neuroscientists that Wikipedia lists, 245 are women from 35 countries.

     THE CYGNUS CONNECTION: Accumulation of knowledge of universe and human evolution reveals the value of human peaceful co-operation. Serbia gave us Milutin Milankovic (1879-1958) who discovered the earth’s 100,000, 41,000, and 23,000 year climatic cycles due to changing tilt, orbit going from circular to spherical,and precession. The UK contributed Charles Darwin (1809 -82), Andrew Collins (1957-) present author of the Cygnus Mystery, and Dennis Montgomery, anthropologist who spent many years in Africa. The United States provided Carl Sagan (1934-1996). Russia gave us Iosif Shklovski (1916-1985 astrophysicist who, in 1962 wrote “Intelligence in the Universe”.

       Finding in the 1920’s that radiation can cause gene mutations led to speculation that cosmic rays may have influenced human evolution. Cosmic rays tend to break up when they collide with oxygen and nitrogen nuclei producing a variety of charged particles including beryllium 10 that accumulates in ice.

  Ice core drillings at the Russian Vostok base in Antarctica and by the USA in Greenland revealed a puzzling increase at 60,000, 35,000, and 17,000 years ago, each period lasting about 2,000 years and matching timings of marked improvements in human abilities. Similar findings are found in a stalagmite from a blue hole in the Bahamas. Carl Sagan blamed a neutron star. A Soviet-American team computed a supernova explosion 150 light years away in Cygnus whose radiation was dispersed cyclically by solar winds and could well have been the sourced of our genetic improvements. We owe Andrew Collins and Dennis Montgomery for keeping alive our Cygnus donor. We are indeed one with our universe.

    Cygnus, this Swan or Summer Triangle constellation has been important to humans since antiquity. It was depicted on the walls of the Lascaux Cave in southern France first occupied 17,000 years ago. Some 12,800 years ago its Northern Cross was also depicted as a swan in Church Hole Cave in Derbyshire, England. The Gobekli Tepe stone temple in Southeast Turkey, 11,500 years ago was built oriented towards Cygnus.

    I was also attracted to Cygnus. During WWII, I used the 3 bright Cygnus vortex stars, Deneb, Altair, and Vega as navigational aids. I carried a sextant with a built in bubble to maintain a level horizon, and a clockworks mechanism to average 60 star-elevation shots over a 2-minute period to counter aircraft vibrations. Using 3 large volumes of spherical trigonometry I could compute a 2-star fix. All this would take 5 minutes so it would tell me where I was 15 miles back as our groundspeed averaged 180 knots.

    Deneb is our 19th brightest star with a luminosity 54,000 times the Sun, a diameter 110 times the Sun, and a surface temperature of 8525 Kelvin (8252 Celsius or 414,885 Fahrenheit). It is the farthest-known first-magnitude star from Earth about 1,550 light years away.

    We are all one with the universe. Enjoy, and make good compassionate use of your current time with it. We may have only a tiny part of it but we are learning how to take care of it and, if we do, we may be rewarded with a longer welcome.

Ye Olde Scribe