is the earth a zoo?

[kymho...@gmail.com]

OK. This has come up before on this group as well as the ufo
literature. There is an idea in ufo lore that the Earth may be some
kind of "zoo" maintained by Our Friends. Various things have been
proposed as to the situation humanity finds itself in depending on the
aims of said Friends, ranging from breeding stock through food to
really weird stuff about recycling souls. :)

My note for today is to speculate there may be a rational way to
determine whether some of this is actually true without having to ask
"anybody".

Some question on another group about the spread of life in the
universe got me to writing some little simulations. Very very
simple. That's how we like to start things.

The first program simulated a 1-dimension universe as a string of
letters. What the letters mean is not specified. Maybe chemical
elements or basic sub-atomic particles. But maybe other things like
"information" or "kinds of life".

The simulator uses a very general "rewrite system" concept to model
"natural laws" in the simulated universe. Saw laws say how different
stuff (modelled as strings of letters) can be created from the presence
or interaction of various other stuff, or could be destroyed by the
presence of certain other stuff. You could the of these "rewrite laws"
as chemical reactions. But they essentially capture everything that
can be calculated or computed (an old computer language SNOBOL used
this as a way to write any program way back in the 50s or 60s).

It's then possible to make the simulation generate a set of random
laws of creation and destruction, setup a small initial universe, and
watch what happens over time. The usual scenario is the parts of the
universe interact using the laws and generally grow and become more
complicated over time. Just like we see looking out into the real
universe.

Now the idea is this. We *might* be able to create a simple simulator
for the evolution of life on earth. With a given set of
creation/destruction rules we might be able to capture the creation
and destruction of species. I.e. instead of our string of letters
representing different chemicals, they could represent whole species
or groups of species.

We might be able to watch species come and go over time from the start
of life on earth up to now.

Using appropriate information about how species have come and gone on
earth as we read it from the record in the rocks, we might then be
able to determine whether life on earth has grown, thrived and died in
an entirely natural or expected way. Or perhaps determine that it can
not look the way the record in the rocks says it was unless there was
a certain amount of non-random interference.

Just as my "nav simulation" (the new record is a set of asteroids and
comets an AI found now track about 45% of UFO sightings reported to
the NUFORC between 2006 and 2023) can match a bunch of UFO's hopping
between a list of asteroids against UFO sightings reported on Earth
and decide which set of asteroids and exactly what details make the
match as close as possible to "perfect", the proposed Life On Earth
simulation might be able to show there is "no way" an un-guided
evolution of species one from the other can explain the trajectory of
species creation and destruction actually seen on planet dirt over the
past ~4 bn years.

We might be able to determine if we do live in a zoo or not.

--
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
- Marie Curie

[No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:]
Whether you work in the UFO warehouse at Area 52, are the surgeon who
handles the alien autopsies, or are the designer of the amazing
climate cleaning machine, if your work is classified, you can't blow
the whistle on it for the public good and expect the law to work in
your favor.
-- David W Brown, "How to Blow the Whistle if You Work With Flying
Saucers and Their Alien Pilots". A letter from Clearance Jobs, an
organization representing govt workers with high security clearances.

"[F]or the few cases in all domains--space, air, and sea--that do
demonstrate potentially anomalous characteristics, AARO exists to help the
DOD, IC, and interagency resolve those anomalous cases. In doing so, AARO is
approaching these cases with the highest level of objectivity and analytic
rigor. This includes physically testing and employing modeling and
simulation to validate our analyses and underlying theories, and
peer-reviewing those results within the US govt, industry partners,
and appropriately cleared academic institutions before reaching any
conclusions."
-- Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, Senate Hearings on UFOs, 19 Apr 2023.

How big a deal is NASA's new UFO study?
[image] An unidentified flying object, as seen by a US Navy jet.
Space.com, 18 July 2022
In early June, NASA announced that it's commissioning an independent study
on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), as UFOs have recently been rebranded.
The intent is to move the scientific understanding of UAP forward, said
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science.
"NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and
apply here also," Zurbuchen said in a statement. "We have access to a
broad range of observations of Earth from space - and that is the
lifeblood of scientific inquiry. We have the tools and team who can
help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That's the very
definition of what science is. That's what we do."
The UAP study team will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, previously
the chair of the astrophysics department at Princeton University.
"Given the paucity of observations, our first task is simply to gather
the most robust set of data that we can," Spergel said in the NASA
statement. "We will be identifying what data -- from civilians,
govt, non-profits, companies -- exists, what else we should try
to collect and how to best analyze it."
[The investigation of why NASA has missed something obvious to many
for the past 65+ years will come later. But it argues that classical
approaches of Organised Science might draw another blank on UFO's].