One of the most profound scientific discoveries of the 20th century revealed that mass is simply an extremely concentrated form of energy. Scientists even determined that the energy in any given quantity of mass is the weight of that mass times the speed of light squared.
Now, the speed of light is a profoundly large number and, when you multiply that number by itself, you get an even more insanely large number.
Unfortunately, even though we know we have all this energy locked up in every quantity of mass, actually making it happen (harvesting that energy) is a bit more problematic.
During the 20th century, scientists figured out two ways to convert mass to energy and these are referred to as fission and fusion.
In fission, a large fissionable atom is hit with a neutron that breaks it up into a bunch of smaller atoms. For fusion, extreme high heat convinces two smaller atoms to fuse together to form a larger atom. In both cases the newly formed atoms have less mass than the original atoms and that difference is the quantity of mass that has been converted to energy.
With this in mind, it is extremely unfortunate that the first public awareness of this “mass is energy” phenomenon came when a fission bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. After that, we witnessed an arms race, lots of testing and all our political leaders choosing to use public fear of it all to control us (fear is a politician’s favorite too to make us do their bidding) rather than pushing to advance the technology and use it to make everyone’s life better.
Though fusion has proven impossible to manage and control, fission technology has been safely generating electricity since 1954. But the nagging question that should have been asked over and over was always, maybe there is a better way to do this.
It has recently occurred to me that there might be a shortcut to solving the problem. Over the centuries there have been uncounted reports of alien spaceships and even many alien abductions. So common are alien abductions that they have been given a name “close encounters of the third kind.”
Hopefully, most will agree that alien spaceships are not powered by wood stoves. In fact, the only way to support space travel is some technology that converts mass directly into energy.
My shortcut is to explain the whole “mass is energy” concept in layman’s terms to everyone on the planet and let it be known that anyone abducted by aliens must plead with their captors to please, pretty please, share the technology they use for converting mass directly into energy.
Robert Crocker
Chehalis
