#Idea: SpaCE eleVAtor

Quote of AWESOMENESS: “Life in orbit is spectacular.” – Tim Peake

 

 

Imagine this:

Morning burst like a bubble as the alarm shouted: “WAKE UP, IT’S 6 AM!“. The sun was showing off as the clouds slowly dispersed until it was nothing but fine grains of salt scattered across the sky. An announcement popped on the news telegram showing the weather and a little notification about all the events and stores that were broadcasting they’re open hours. You decide to go for a little hover as you look up into the thoughtfully designed elevators shooting to the stars. It was a piece of artwork. Luckily, you had put in your schedule to go for a zoom into space today with a couple of friends. You and your friends meet up at one of the elevator points and get in with your special suits (which, by the way, look absolutely amazing) and designed gear. The countdown starts, “Please make sure you’re properly suited up and secured to the wall…. 5…. 4… 3.. 2..”

Before you could say “snickerdoodle”, the elevator starts its ascend into the sky and the ground below you starts to shrink. Your favorite song plays over the speaker as you and your friends start discussing which restaurant on which planet you wanted to try this time……

Okay, maybe the planet-hopping might take a little more brainstorming and planning and researching, but wouldn’t this be such an adventure. 

 

Today we shall be discussing (yes, I know, that was a very formal-serious-big word I just used) the 𝓢𝓹𝓪𝓬𝓮 𝓮𝓵𝓮𝓿𝓪𝓽𝓸𝓻. Okay, so, let us proceed…..

Ideas of the space elevator have already been put out there for quite some time. “What is it?”, you may be asking yourself. Well, basically, it’s an elevator which starts here (on our beautiful planet) and goes on and on and on until space. I know, that would be pretty long. I mean, I already have trouble just thinking about using an elevator with a hundred floors. All fears aside, I would have to admit, an elevator TO SPACE is pretty awesome.

 

Transportation of goods would be relatively cheaper because aerospace companies wouldn’t have to keep remanufacturing space rockets and other things. We would be moving forward towards ideas on planet-hopping and studying more about the space world and cheering on, as Buzz Lightyear so famously quoted, ” to infinity and beyond!”. 

 

However, there are some elements that would have to be considered and have safety protocols in return. Some are the following:

• The weather
• Conflicts with countries and people who would use this for something other than good
• The strength of the material used for building
• Passing meteors or space junk that might 

To wrap everything up, researchers and scientists are still ongoing with how we are to design this access to space. Ideas keep on coming. It might seem like such a huge project and idea, but researchers are still definitely working to have this in our future. 

Yours truly,

L.O.A.S.H

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© Elizabeth Anne Villoria

Lucid Dreaming, Time Well Spent ☁️

Quote of TRUTH: “If you must sleep through a third of your life, why should you sleep through your dreams too?” ~ Stephen LaBerge

An average human spends about 33 years of their life in bed; 26 years of the 33 will be spent sleeping while the rest is used up in trying to get oneself to sleep. The average life expectancy ranges from 75 to 80 years. During the time of sleep, the average person normally experiences around 4 to 8 dreams per night. Looking at the numbers, a person undergoes roughly more than 100,000 dreams in their lifetime. Dreams, where the dreamer is aware and conscious that they are dreaming, is known as lucid dreaming. Although being able to control the dream is sometimes not attainable at the start, this can be achieved in the future with more exercise. There are many benefits that the dreamer may get when they lucid dream. With this practice, one would be able to add to the list of experiences they’ve had in their life, overcome fears, discover new things, and so much more. I believe that if more people were to practice lucid dreaming they would be benefitting themselves more in every way.

 

Lucid dreaming is a gateway to opportunity. And, because of this reason, many get drawn to the idea of lucid dreaming. It allows you to do what you couldn’t or wouldn’t normally do when you are awake. Flying, tasting the clouds, planet hopping, running with lions, and the list goes on. Your mind is a powerful tool; the things it may imagine are endless. Many have practiced this and had the ability to walk when they couldn’t walk and so much more. Lucid dreaming is truly beneficial. For my experiment, I got 10 different people, half of the group boys and half of the group girls. The ages are ranging from 14-18. For a whole two weeks, after explaining to them what lucid dreaming is, I asked to practice and achieve lucid dreaming. Then, I recorded what they had experienced and if they thought it to be beneficial to them as well.

 

For the first week of the experiment, a majority of the group had a difficult time getting to lucid dream. It does take some practice so I had told them to keep trying until they had done it. The experiment took a week or so longer than I had anticipated because lucid dreaming was only properly achieved during the end of the second week and the beginning of the third week. Although not always possible, more than half of my dreamers were able to achieve lucid dreaming in less than 4 weeks, fortunately. During the third week of the experiment, this is when I started to record the results. After lucid dreaming, the group had reported feeling they had more determination as they fell asleep with their new discovery with sleeping. They also said lucid dreaming was really entertaining and had benefited with some things they had always wanted to do. One example, Chloe, age 15 and one of my volunteers in this experiment, has done modeling before but still had the lingering stage and people fright as she walked the stage. During lucid dreaming, she practiced repeatedly going up and down the stage for her modeling. When Chloe had another modeling session, she said that her confidence was noticeably better and she didn’t seem to have much problem anymore with her stage fright. This is only one of the examples from the whole group and I think it really helps prove that lucid dreaming can be really helpful when trying to solve these problems, like different fears.

 

I didn’t know the proper advice to give, at the start, to let my dreamers acknowledge they were in a dream and start lucid dreaming. However, I was able to gain good insight eventually on ideas to give my dreamers as I read a study that was done. This study was conducted by a group of researchers at Stanford who was helping their subjects they were testing to remember they were dreaming. One of the writers of the book had claimed, along with the backing of “thousands of other lucid dreamers” that lucid dreams are truly a wonderful, vivid, exhilarating, extraordinary, and intense experience. With their study, they were able to aid a few dreamers on how to achieve this. The experiment was using cues to remind the dreamer that they are dreaming. The first thing that they did was cue the dreamer as they slept with a tape-recorded message that repeatedly said: “This is a dream”. The results of this first test gave feedback on the proficiency of the tape-recorded message as a cue. Some of their subjects were able to lucid dream with this, however, the first few attempts showed the problems: it awoke the dreamer with the sound or the dreamer completely ignored the message. The next test was using vibrators strapped to the subject’s ankles. Throughout the day, as the dreamers were awake, they would practice telling themselves that they were in a dream whenever they felt the vibration. The results showed that the 11 out of 18 dreamers were able to lucid dream with the vibration cue. However, they tried another kind of cue as the vibrations “…posed a number of technical difficulties”. Finally, they tested a cue using lights. There were more results to their subjects who hadn’t even yet got to lucid dream. This research resulted in the fact that using sensory cues are useful and effective when helping to lucid dream and that the dreamers may really benefit from it. (LaBerge, S., & Rheingold, H., 1991)

 

The health benefits of lucid dreaming are also included in these lucid dreams. It is proven that those who frequently lucid dream are higher on the LOC scale (Blagrove, M., & Hartnell, S. J., 2000). LOC stands for the Locus of Control. In the 1950s, Julian Rotter brought up LOC to the surface. It is said that one with an internal locus of control believes that he or she is the one in control and have the influence to their outcomes and goals. However, those with an external locus of control believe that everything that happens to them is by fate or nature, and the only thing to blame for an inconvenience would be the outside forces. This means that with more practice of lucid dreaming, the person doing this would have a higher standard of being and have more positivity, which is good.

 

In another study conducted in Vienna by Doll, Gittler, and Holzinger (2009), they had a total of eighty-nine subjects. There were 42 women and 47 men who volunteered to be in the study, the mean age of the group was 36.25 ± 10.42 years. The purpose of the study was to see the health benefits that lucid dreaming had to those who practiced it. As the study went on, they were able to prove that the frequent lucid dreamers were able to show better mental health than those who were non-lucid dreamers. These researchers were able to make known that truly just by lucid dreaming, the mental state one is in, has the ability to become better and more improved.

In conclusion, lucid dreaming is possible to achieve and when it is achieved there are so many ways that it benefits. Although it may take some time, practice, and patience to reach that goal, it’s still out there possible to do. There are already thousands that practice it for pleasure and health benefits. I would say that my hypothesis is proven to be true as lucid dreaming is truly beneficial in so many ways and that it’s time well spent once you do master it. And, as time goes on, hopefully, lucid dreaming will be practiced by more and more people and use all their time sleeping in a better more efficient way.

 

Do you agree?

Yours truly,

L.O.A.S.H

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© Elizabeth Anne Villoria

Future Civilizations with Michio Kaku

Let’s paint an image, imagine a world where everything is super advanced. Where you could actually see flying cars instead of youtube videos of it saying that they exist. And, a world where the sky is truly the limit and people take advantage of it, in a good way. A world where you put on your calendar to meet up with your cousin who recently moved to mars for a few days then return back to earth. Another way to see this would be a world that also has the same technology as seen in Wakanda (to all those whose seen Black Panther “WAKANDA FOREVER!!!”).

Okay, okay back to the topic. Wait, what was it again?

Oh, yeah, having a really really really advanced world which is in no comparison to our world (for now).

Let’s explore more about this with Michio Kaku in his chapter on advanced civilizations. Who is Michio Kaku exactly? First, in my opinion, he is an awesome scientist. He is also an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science. Okay, now that we’ve covered that back to advanced civilizations. It was actually in 1964 when Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev introduced the classification of advanced civilization. Initially, Kardashev came up with 3 types of civilizations which are the following:

1. Type I civilization:
   • a.k.a the planetary civilization
   • this civilization would be able to employ all the energy that reaches the planet and all the energy it can produce
   • This energy is solar, thermal, hydro, wind, and more
   • Michio Kaku predicts we would have control over things such as earthquakes, the weather, and volcanoes
   • With research, it was found that this type of civilization would harness the power of 7 x 10⁷
   • To get to this state, we would have to boost our current energy production to 100,000 times
   • We are estimated to reach this stage in about 100-200 years
2. Type II civilization:
   • Would also probably be classified as an interplanetary civilization, too
   • We would be able to use the total energy of our sun (a star)
   • Have the ability to move planets and stars
   • To accomplish harnessing the energy of a star, we would be using a megastructure called the Dyson Sphere 
   • We are estimated to reach this stage in about 1000-2000 years 
3. Type III civilization:
   • at this point, everything would be different from today
   • We’d have space travelers zooming everywhere
   • And, the norm would possibly be cyborgs 
   • We would also have the power to use the energy of an entire galaxy
   • This, as Michio Kaku is estimated to happen in about “one hundred thousand years and possibly not for a million years”

Type o to Type I

In case you were wondering, we are a Type o at the moment and for quite some time, too. The first thing that we would have to do is change from Type o to Type I. Now, we have some obstacles that are preventing and slowing down the process of actually advancing forward and helping our world socially and technologically to reach the next stage. As Michio Kaku writes, “the biggest threat facing a Type I civilization may be a self-inflicted one” and some of the challenges include “global warming, bioterrorism, and nuclear proliferation”. 

Problems preventing the transition from Type o to Type I

Expanding on the problems, global warming, which has been a threat to humanity has countless evidence which Kaku notes, the following:

• EVERY major glacier on the Earth is receding
• The Northern polar ice has thinned by an average of 50 PERCENT over the past fifty years
• Large parts of Greenland, which are covered by the world’s second-largest ice sheet, are tawing out
• A section of Antartica the size of Delaware, the Larsen Ice Shelf C, broke off in 2017, and the stability of the ice sheets and ice shelves is now in question
• The last few years have been the hottest ever recorded in human history
• The Earth’s average temperature has increased by the 1.3 degrees Celsius in the past century
• On average, summer is about one week longer than it was in the past 
• We are seeing more and more “one-hundred-year events,” such as forest fires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes

Another great danger which the world and humans face which have been there for quite some time is diseases, plagues, and epidemics. The influenza epidemic killed an estimate of 50 million people whereas the war itself had it’s estimated down to 20 million less than that of influenza. The problem with this? There is such a thing as a weaponized biogerms. Yes, I know, terrible, if there is such a ferocious disease which gets created and released it has the potential to eliminate 98% of the human population! These are some of the things that have made it difficult for our advancement. Breaking from this would be a difficult job and a challenge when we emerge to a new civilization. But, if we work together, stop the competition, the inequality and put our awesome minds together, maybe we could transition to a better and advanced civilization compared to where we are now.

Future civilizations may change and evolve. But, with the decisions that are made today, in this century will help in determining whether that change would be better or for worse. If we take the right steps and choices, it may be possible to be living in a world where we have laser porting (which is a future way of traveling[g to the stars in light speed), space elevators, programmable matter, robotic construction, fusion power, asteroid mining, and a better-civilized world…. 

….and maybe (MAYBE) we might be living in a really cool world like in WAKANDA. Am I right?!?!

Hope you’re having an awesome day, afternoon, or night! Till the next blog, bye!!

Yours truly,

L.O.A.S.H

 

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 © Elizabeth Anne Villoria