Yeah, Baby! Back to the Moon!

[Brian Peacock]

Shh. Don't give the plot twist away.

[Woodbutcher]

Obviously Galaxian's technology uses dark energy as a fuel. When you burn dark matter you end up with light matter, so light that it travels at the speed of light. The dark matter will always be invisible to us, because it travels so fast that light cannot quite catch up to it. The sun may come up each morning, but the dark will always be ahead of it.

[JimC]

Galaxian is a poopy head.

[Svartalf]

                      

!!1!	NOTMOD JimC, the quoted post contains a personal attack on a fellow poster, please desist

Galaxian is a poopy head.

[Galaxian]

Since the mid-seventies the species seems to have lost its vision and aspirations. The TV science programs of that era, such as "Tomorrows World" and "Towards 2000" predicted 1 day work weeks & Moon bases by the 80's and Mars bases by the year 2,000. We saw confirmation of that in the movie "2001, a Space Odyssey".
Then it all went to pot. Although it was possible to do those things governments lacked vision & became frightened by the prospects. Not since JFK has there been a visionary president. Hopefully, Trump is that president... we'll see.

They've already done it...years ago. There's been permanent bases on the Moon & Mars, and probably elsewhere for decades.
The Apollo missions were a distraction, for the sheeple to keep thinking that it was all an undiscovered mystery.

Will the real Galaxian please stand up?

There's no contradiction in the above posts. For a long time Galaxian has made references to 'sheeple'. Distinguishing them from the rulers, Illuminati, alien overlords (or any synonym), in other words, those who rule us & govern all important affairs.

So, for example, the overlords have clean hot & cold running water. The sheeple have troughs. The troughs are allowed so that the sheeple don't die of thirst. The Apollo (fake) missions were allowed to keep us amused. Meanwhile, the overlords have proper spacecraft... those that you simply enter, start up, & fly away to your destination.
There is no reason why the two technologies can't run side by side. After all, both are virtually free. The cost is an illusion. And there is no reason why YOU should be told about it. Be thankful that Galaxian has revealed that much to you.
For many decades I have spoken & written about trillions of planets and billions of civilizations throughout the Universe. Others have done so for some centuries. They, and I have been mocked & ridiculed. But now we (except for yourself?) have been given permission to have those views.
It is now commonplace for astronomers to speak of planets around MOST stars. But permission has not been granted to speak of life or civilizations on any of those planets. Eventually it may be, but by then we & our children will be exterminated to make way for a higher species.

[Galaxian]

                      

!!1!	NOTMOD JimC, the quoted post contains a personal attack on a fellow poster, please desist

Galaxian is a poopy head.

Thank you Svartalf. Galaxian is not just a "poopy head" but a delusional, paranoid sack of shit. I've been called far worse, and far more often, by my parents, no less.

[Galaxian]

Just build a space elevator first

Thank you for that excellent video. So an elevator is OK, but a Mach's Principle device is not?

[pErvinalia]

Since the mid-seventies the species seems to have lost its vision and aspirations. The TV science programs of that era, such as "Tomorrows World" and "Towards 2000" predicted 1 day work weeks & Moon bases by the 80's and Mars bases by the year 2,000. We saw confirmation of that in the movie "2001, a Space Odyssey".
Then it all went to pot. Although it was possible to do those things governments lacked vision & became frightened by the prospects. Not since JFK has there been a visionary president. Hopefully, Trump is that president... we'll see.

They've already done it...years ago. There's been permanent bases on the Moon & Mars, and probably elsewhere for decades.
The Apollo missions were a distraction, for the sheeple to keep thinking that it was all an undiscovered mystery.

Will the real Galaxian please stand up?

There's no contradiction in the above posts. For a long time Galaxian has made references to 'sheeple'. Distinguishing them from the rulers, Illuminati, alien overlords (or any synonym), in other words, those who rule us & govern all important affairs.

So, for example, the overlords have clean hot & cold running water. The sheeple have troughs. The troughs are allowed so that the sheeple don't die of thirst. The Apollo (fake) missions were allowed to keep us amused. Meanwhile, the overlords have proper spacecraft... those that you simply enter, start up, & fly away to your destination.
There is no reason why the two technologies can't run side by side. After all, both are virtually free. The cost is an illusion. And there is no reason why YOU should be told about it. Be thankful that Galaxian has revealed that much to you.
For many decades I have spoken & written about trillions of planets and billions of civilizations throughout the Universe. Others have done so for some centuries. They, and I have been mocked & ridiculed. But now we (except for yourself?) have been given permission to have those views.
It is now commonplace for astronomers to speak of planets around MOST stars. But permission has not been granted to speak of life or civilizations on any of those planets. Eventually it may be, but by then we & our children will be exterminated to make way for a higher species.

You're off your nut (more so than usual).

[Galaxian]

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Shakespeare (Hamlet)

The moon is a test bed. Better to set up a permanent manned station on the moon, which is only days or weeks away, than on Mars where no help can be had for months. So many technologies could be tested and refined there without the more extreme risk associated with Mars. Imagine what we would learn from a lunar observatory, for example.
I say just fucking do it, man.

They've already done it...years ago. There's been permanent bases on the Moon & Mars, and probably elsewhere for decades. The Apollo missions were a distraction, for the sheeple to keep thinking that it was all an undiscovered mystery. There have been TWO space programs running in parallel: one the primitive thing with rockets (the equivalent of a horse & buggy). The second with advanced technology, such as Mach Tractors, anti-gravity generators & plasma drives.

Those assertions and the existence of those technologies unfasifuable - no more credible than saying they have hollowed out the moon and you get there by teleportation pods. The possibility of something being true is not proportional to the number of YouTube videos asserting it.

There are lots of things that are "unfalsifiable" but you still believe them. Such as, is the water around La Roche Godon (Amsterdam Island) salty? How would you know? Have you been there? If you've read it somewhere, how do you know it is true? Does La Roche Godon even exist?

The advanced drives do trips to Mars in a matter of hours to days. To the Moon in just an hour. They are ready for immediate use & re-use, just like a car or truck. They get there, and they can leave again straight away.

No doubt you will also claim that these vehicles use dark technologies that are unvisible to everybody and everything studying the sky, that their energy sources are novel and produce no discernable emissions, and that their manufacture is economically untraceable too. Unfalsidiabla claims like these are inditinguishable from falsehood, fiction or fantasy.

Do YOU see everything that goes on up in the sky? How often do you look up into a clear, dark sky? Be truthful now!
If a spaceship was pitch black, how would you see it against the blackness of Space? If a craft leaving Earth is running on batteries, where are the emissions when it uses a Mach tractor?

Many of the so-called missing are on those bases and others. Such as some of the thousands of children who go missing every year. But the bottom feeders are not told. There is no reason for the sheeple to know anything. They have no right to know. They are only expected to serve.

Whom, and to what end?

For fun. Amusement. Wiling away the time. Do you play any games? Do you watch any sports? WHY, to what end? Should everything revolve around money? And those you serve are those who demand servitude. And you have NO choice.

And soon, with intelligent & versatile robotics, there will be no more use for sheeple. The next phase of intelligent life on Earth will replace Homo Sapiens. And that's less than a generation away.

So an aspect of our own technology has become self aware, gone dark, and is usurping our entire planetary biology? With the technological marvels and capabiluties you've claimed to exist this should happened already - but it seems Moon Base Alpha is waiting for Google, Tesla and Panasonic to perfect robotics for them first.

No, Moon Base Alpha is not waiting for Google et al. I've explained before, these are parallel societies, parallel technologies. YOU have NO right to them. YOU are a bottom feeder. That's all there is to it. Exactly in the same way as chimpanzees use twigs to explore termite mounds. When did you ask why they don't use our advanced technology for that. Do the chimps ask? When did we offer it to them? Would they even appreciate it if we did give them our technology?

It's down to you to provide some evidence (and no, YouTubes of people making the same kinds of assumptions isn't evidence). If part of you story relies on the claim that these things are impossible to verify because of a CONSPURIOUSY THEORY then we`ll be back to having a rational cause to disbelive unfalsifiable assertions.

No, it's not down to me to provide some evidence. Galaxian is not here to persuade you. You need to persuade yourself. I am only here to inform. Take that information & look for the evidence, or not, as you wish. But if only you knew, the evidence is hidden in plain sight. In this age of the information super highway it's found quickly. I will NOT help you.

[pErvinalia]

Empty assertions.

[Animavore]

I have a friend who is schizophrenic. I used to listen to him and pander to his delusions thinking I was helping. I met a psychiatrist who told me this is absolutely not what you should do.

You should disengage this from one.

[Forty Two]

I spent my teenage years on the Space Coast during the Apollo program. The place was booming, man. Lots of very high paid jobs for engineers, rocket scientists and the like. Plus all the ancillary industries from small parts manufacturers to restaurants to car mechanics. When the program stopped it was like the Great Depression. I remember our neighbor, an engineer who worked on the steering systems for the booster motors, begging my Dad for a job as a surveyor. He ended up hanging himself in his garage, poor sod, couldn't get a job anywhere. My best mate's Dad was an electrical engineer, he ended up working in a sandwich shop and drinking himself to death. A new space program is money far, far, far better spent than practically anything else I can think of.

Setting up a world beating renewable energy sector would be better.

Not an either/or option. The technological development of space exploration, and the need to develop renewable energy options for Moon and Mars bases would be instrumental to advancing the renewable energy technology. The bang for the buck would be far greater than dumping billions into bankrupt "green energy" companies which just wind up being huge boondoggles.

Renewable energy is great - but, it's a rather naive thing to suspect that the government knows how to create a new energy industry, and is just not doing it because of the evil oil interests. The government doesn't know how to do it. Nobody knows.

[Brian Peacock]

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Shakespeare (Hamlet)

The moon is a test bed. Better to set up a permanent manned station on the moon, which is only days or weeks away, than on Mars where no help can be had for months. So many technologies could be tested and refined there without the more extreme risk associated with Mars. Imagine what we would learn from a lunar observatory, for example.
I say just fucking do it, man.

They've already done it...years ago. There's been permanent bases on the Moon & Mars, and probably elsewhere for decades. The Apollo missions were a distraction, for the sheeple to keep thinking that it was all an undiscovered mystery. There have been TWO space programs running in parallel: one the primitive thing with rockets (the equivalent of a horse & buggy). The second with advanced technology, such as Mach Tractors, anti-gravity generators & plasma drives.

Those assertions and the existence of those technologies [is] unfasifuable - no more credible than saying they have hollowed out the moon and you get there by teleportation pods. The possibility of something being true is not proportional to the number of YouTube videos asserting it.

There are lots of things that are "unfalsifiable" but you still believe them. Such as, is the water around La Roche Godon (Amsterdam Island) salty? How would you know? Have you been there? If you've read it somewhere, how do you know it is true? Does La Roche Godon even exist?

The advanced drives do trips to Mars in a matter of hours to days. To the Moon in just an hour. They are ready for immediate use & re-use, just like a car or truck. They get there, and they can leave again straight away.

No doubt you will also claim that these vehicles use dark technologies that are unvisible to everybody and everything studying the sky, that their energy sources are novel and produce no discernable emissions, and that their manufacture is economically untraceable too. Unfalsidiabla claims like these are inditinguishable from falsehood, fiction or fantasy.

Do YOU see everything that goes on up in the sky? How often do you look up into a clear, dark sky? Be truthful now!
If a spaceship was pitch black, how would you see it against the blackness of Space? If a craft leaving Earth is running on batteries, where are the emissions when it uses a Mach tractor?

Many of the so-called missing are on those bases and others. Such as some of the thousands of children who go missing every year. But the bottom feeders are not told. There is no reason for the sheeple to know anything. They have no right to know. They are only expected to serve.

Whom, and to what end?

For fun. Amusement. Wiling away the time. Do you play any games? Do you watch any sports? WHY, to what end? Should everything revolve around money? And those you serve are those who demand servitude. And you have NO choice.

And soon, with intelligent & versatile robotics, there will be no more use for sheeple. The next phase of intelligent life on Earth will replace Homo Sapiens. And that's less than a generation away.

So an aspect of our own technology has become self aware, gone dark, and is usurping our entire planetary biology? With the technological marvels and capa-bull-ities you've claimed to exist this should happened already - but it seems Moon Base Alpha is waiting for Google, Tesla and Panasonic to perfect robotics for them first.

No, Moon Base Alpha is not waiting for Google et al. I've explained before, these are parallel societies, parallel technologies. YOU have NO right to them. YOU are a bottom feeder. That's all there is to it. Exactly in the same way as chimpanzees use twigs to explore termite mounds. When did you ask why they don't use our advanced technology for that. Do the chimps ask? When did we offer it to them? Would they even appreciate it if we did give them our technology?

It's down to you to provide some evidence (and no, YouTubes of people making the same kinds of assumptions isn't evidence). If part of you story relies on the claim that these things are impossible to verify because of a CONSPURIOUSY THEORY then we`ll be back to having a rational cause to disbelive unfalsifiable assertions.

No, it's not down to me to provide some evidence. Galaxian is not here to persuade you. You need to persuade yourself. I am only here to inform. Take that information & look for the evidence, or not, as you wish. But if only you knew, the evidence is hidden in plain sight. In this age of the information super highway it's found quickly. I will NOT help you.

Your first interjection qualifies you as a philosophical idealist. How can I know the sea is salty, you ask: it may have been salty the last time I went for a paddle, but at this very moment, now, with no immediate access to the shore and, therefore, no direct experience that would confirm the saltiness of seawater I have no rational basis on which to contend the essential minerality of oceanic bodies - one way or another. Indeed, you ask not only whether I can assure my contentions about sea salinity, but charge me with providing some sort of proof, if only to myself, that oceans, along with the bodies which they enclose, even exist at all.

Philosophical idealism maintains that reality is a mental construct rooted in perceptual experience--that is; that the experience of reality is the reality of experience--and thus, accordingly, the doctrine exerts a significant degree of skepticism about the possibility of knowledge and of knowing anything that we cannot experience, or are not experiencing, directly - right here, right now. In this respect your interjection undermines your own assertions: how can you know anything about Moon Bases Alpha and Beta; have you been there; did you read it somewhere, did somebody tell you about it, and how can you trust them or secure what they report about their own experience; if the Moon was in the heavens last night how do you know it will be there this evening; does the Moon even exist at all? You can see the limits of taking this approach to requests for support I'm sure.

There is a certain predictability in this defence which must be accounted for. By predictability I do not mean that your reply is predictable in as much as it foregoes addressing the point in favour of shifting the burden and challenging the foundation of knowledge, which of course it does. I mean there is a certain predictability in the systems of the natural world which we encounter and understand both on an experiential level and on the level of our attempts to identify and explicate through the epistemological adventures of scientific endeavour the nature of things and stuff.

The ocean does not turn into jam; doors do not become cattle before forming simulacra of Lara Croft (would that they were); carbon atoms do not sprout legs an wings and carry distressed maidens off to the impossible heights of invisible castles. The story of the possible is not written in the realm of the imagination but in the empirical realm. While all natural systems are in flux they are not fluxible to such a wild degree and, therefore, if we are rigours in our observation and diligent in our reasoning, we can systematically chip away at the edifice of our own ignorance to get at a seam of knowledge beneath; to arrive at a point where we can say that we are, to some qualified extent, entitled to our claims to understanding and knowledge.

The ocean is a body of specific, identifiable chemical elements, a large body of H2O which forms the substrate for a raft of other elements, our understanding of the nature of chemical reactions is rigorously supported by observation and experimentation, and it is the repeatability of those experiments, as attempts to provide a genuine test of any theory or hypothesis and by so doing endeavour to falsify the implicit claim, and/or to refute it, which ultimately confirm those observations, support the claims, and allow us to develop and deploy predictive models of the natural world based thereon.

When a theory or hypothesis resists all attempts to falsify it then we are entitled to say that we know a particular something-or-other about a particular something-or-other - if only until new information or a better, more parsimonious explanation of the information we have comes along. Claims to knowledge which cannot be falsified by any means, which cannot be tested, foreclose on the possibility of corroboratory or confirmatory support. Basically, they are worthless - the knowledge to which they aspire is beyond even the reach of those making the claim.

But scientific processes aside, we know from our own direct experience that things in the natural world, which we encounter in our everyday livse, are bound to certain predictabilities: the fire that burnt you today will burn you tomorrow; trees do not change position in the landscape without some mighty force to act upon them; water does not flow uphill; kicking a rock with all your strength will hurt your toes as surely as kicking a policeman will get you arrested.

If your contention is that we cannot rely upon the observed and observable predictability of the natural world or upon the mechanisms--whether that be from our own direct, incorrigible experiences or via the rigorously supported hypotheses, theories, or laws developed by others--by which we apprehend reality, and that as such that which we call knowledge and understanding are rooted in things so uncertain and fluxious that only the direct apprehension of personal experiences, now, in the moment, can confirm and assure any and all knowledge claims, then you must, as must each of us, reobserve and reconfirm all that we think we know about the world - and not simply each morning upon waking, but each passing moment - right here, right now.

In other words, to eschew the predictability of the systems which comprise the natural world is to assert that reality and all knowledge which underpins our understanding of the world, even our own direct experiences, is without both use and meaning. You, my friend, ask us to inhabit a world without knowledge, and an anecdote is no substitution for a fact I can tell you.

Thus the conjecture of your first interjection is undermined, rationally, and fatally so.

Undermining your second interjection relies on similar factors to your first, again you're shifting the burden to avoid addressing the point while issuing challenges rooted in the incorrigible and conflicting nature of your and your challengers personal experiences. Though I would much rather you addressed the points directly, it nonetheless follows, again, that your own specious contentions can be forestalled by the same mean in which you address them, to wit: have you seen one of these marvellous vehicles going up in the sky; how often have you looked for them in a clear, dark sky; do you have records of any such observation and could they be corroborated and confirms, and if so how exactly? Be truthful now!

Astronomers use various means to attend to the local and wider cosmological environment, and routinely observe things which are beyond the direct perceptual capacities, and therefore beyond the direct experience, of humans. Yet, even from Earth, armed with nothing but a clear sky and sturdily secured pair of high-quality binoculars we can observe objects such as asteroids in the shadow of Jupiter even though they emit no light or energy - their passage across a field of view is discernible and mapped by what they occlude. And astronomy is an endeavour not just limited to tenured scientists, engineers, and their assistants, but as a field it benefits significantly from the contributions of a huge, and proportionally much larger, number of enthusiastic armatures in every part of the globe. The sky is a surveilled domain - this issue is not whether I've seen these mysterious travellers or not, but why nobody has seen them.

Now perhaps you are tempted to suggested that the cool-sounding Mach Tractors are designed in such a way as to avoid detection from any observation point on the Earth or in near-orbit, and that the technologies employed are so sophisticated that even the unavoidable, not to mention spectacular, ionisation of the upper atmosphere caused by friction can be, somehow, suppressed or avoided; that the motive forces generated by such machines do not employ the principles of thrust and therefore produce no emissions; that the manufacture of components, and the assembly and maintenance of theses vehicles is completely untraceable, perhaps having no impact on resource and commodity movements or markets, or maybe not even being drawn from resource stocks found on Earth. All these reasons would, surely, explain why no trace of these advanced manufactured items has been, or will ever become, apparent?

However, to say such things would be to erect an unrealisable assertion, like invoking super-natural powers or magick, one which ill-serves your own claims - for if the lauded Mach Tractor is so advances as to be invisible to us in every respect then on what basis do you, dear Galaxian, stake a claim for their existence? Don't hold back now - you are among friends.

You third and fourth interjections rely on that other well-established discursive tactic so prevalent among conspiracy theorists and ideologues of every strip: the fallacy of presuming your conclusion in your premise. To cut a long story short, because the nurse is due shortly to attend to my sores, you presume the existence of advanced technologies and compare and assert that those who employ them have advanced or evolved beyond humans to the same extent or degree that we have evolved and advanced beyond our biological brethren the chimpanzee. By this you offer us insight into their motivation and our status in relation to them, and entreat us to believe without even so much as a hint of any reasonable, rational support that these things even exist in the first place. A better setting for errant rectum-custard of this magnitude is in a work of fiction or fantasy as such forms allow the imagination to range widely and freely without the necessary encumbrances of evidences and rational argument.

In your final remarks you relieve yourself, figuratively speaking of course, of the burden of supporting your own claims, and by so doing you stymie the tentative process of elevating them from their pitiful status of wishful fantasies. You implore us to take your utterances as 'information', as a means to us 'persuading ourselves' in the manner so familiar to those snake oil sellers commonly referred to as religious authorities: "This thing is true. Believe me. Trust me. First you have to want to believe. All you need is Faith. The evidence is all around you - you only have to look for it."

Confabulation on this scale may work for and on feeble-minded dolts, but for most of us belief in the veracity of a claims follows from some reasoned, rational, and therefore compelling, evidence in support of those claims. It is wholly irrational, not mention wholly unreasonable (in every sense), to believe first and then cast around for something, anything, that looks like evidence for it - particularly when all that is being brought to the table are circular arguments and magical thinking. Frankly, your entire conjecture is beyond a joke, and if you think it passes for diligent inquiry and a sound, supported, rigorous, rational conclusion then the joke, such that it is, is on you.

As you chose to begin your rejoiner with The Bard of Avon it seems only fitting that I should conclude this missive in a similar manner.

• Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
  To the last syllable of recorded time;
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
  Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
  And then is heard no more. It is a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.
  
  
  • -- Shakespeare, Macbeth

[JimC]

Galaxian wrote:

...I've been called far worse, and far more often, by my parents, no less...

It's all starting to make sense now...

[Hermit]

Your first interjection qualifies you as a philosophical idealist. How can I know the sea is salty, you ask: it may have been salty the last time I went for a paddle, but at this very moment, now, with no immediate access to the shore and, therefore, no direct experience that would confirm the saltiness of seawater I have no rational basis on which to contend the essential minerality of oceanic bodies - one way or another. Indeed, you ask not only whether I can assure my contentions about sea salinity, but charge me with providing some sort of proof, if only to myself, that oceans, along with the bodies which they enclose, even exist at all.

Philosophical idealism maintains that reality is a mental construct rooted in perceptual experience--that is; that the experience of reality is the reality of experience--and thus, accordingly, the doctrine exerts a significant degree of skepticism about the possibility of knowledge and of knowing anything that we cannot experience, or are not experiencing, directly - right here, right now. In this respect your interjection undermines your own assertions: how can you know anything about Moon Bases Alpha and Beta; have you been there; did you read it somewhere, did somebody tell you about it, and how can you trust them or secure what they report about their own experience; if the Moon was in the heavens last night how do you know it will be there this evening; does the Moon even exist at all? You can see the limits of taking this approach to requests for support I'm sure.

There is a certain predictability in this defence which must be accounted for. By predictability I do not mean that your reply is predictable in as much as it foregoes addressing the point in favour of shifting the burden and challenging the foundation of knowledge, which of course it does. I mean there is a certain predictability in the systems of the natural world which we encounter and understand both on an experiential level and on the level of our attempts to identify and explicate through the epistemological adventures of scientific endeavour the nature of things and stuff.

The ocean does not turn into jam; doors do not become cattle before forming simulacra of Lara Croft (would that they were); carbon atoms do not sprout legs an wings and carry distressed maidens off to the impossible heights of invisible castles. The story of the possible is not written in the realm of the imagination but in the empirical realm. While all natural systems are in flux they are not fluxible to such a wild degree and, therefore, if we are rigours in our observation and diligent in our reasoning, we can systematically chip away at the edifice of our own ignorance to get at a seam of knowledge beneath; to arrive at a point where we can say that we are, to some qualified extent, entitled to our claims to understanding and knowledge.

The ocean is a body of specific, identifiable chemical elements, a large body of H2O which forms the substrate for a raft of other elements, our understanding of the nature of chemical reactions is rigorously supported by observation and experimentation, and it is the repeatability of those experiments, as attempts to provide a genuine test of any theory or hypothesis and by so doing endeavour to falsify the implicit claim, and/or to refute it, which ultimately confirm those observations, support the claims, and allow us to develop and deploy predictive models of the natural world based thereon.

When a theory or hypothesis resists all attempts to falsify it then we are entitled to say that we know a particular something-or-other about a particular something-or-other - if only until new information or a better, more parsimonious explanation of the information we have comes along. Claims to knowledge which cannot be falsified by any means, which cannot be tested, foreclose on the possibility of corroboratory or confirmatory support. Basically, they are worthless - the knowledge to which they aspire is beyond even the reach of those making the claim.

But scientific processes aside, we know from our own direct experience that things in the natural world, which we encounter in our everyday livse, are bound to certain predictabilities: the fire that burnt you today will burn you tomorrow; trees do not change position in the landscape without some mighty force to act upon them; water does not flow uphill; kicking a rock with all your strength will hurt your toes as surely as kicking a policeman will get you arrested.

If your contention is that we cannot rely upon the observed and observable predictability of the natural world or upon the mechanisms--whether that be from our own direct, incorrigible experiences or via the rigorously supported hypotheses, theories, or laws developed by others--by which we apprehend reality, and that as such that which we call knowledge and understanding are rooted in things so uncertain and fluxious that only the direct apprehension of personal experiences, now, in the moment, can confirm and assure any and all knowledge claims, then you must, as must each of us, reobserve and reconfirm all that we think we know about the world - and not simply each morning upon waking, but each passing moment - right here, right now.

In other words, to eschew the predictability of the systems which comprise the natural world is to assert that reality and all knowledge which underpins our understanding of the world, even our own direct experiences, is without both use and meaning. You, my friend, ask us to inhabit a world without knowledge, and an anecdote is no substitution for a fact I can tell you.

Thus the conjecture of your first interjection is undermined, rationally, and fatally so.

Undermining your second interjection relies on similar factors to your first, again you're shifting the burden to avoid addressing the point while issuing challenges rooted in the incorrigible and conflicting nature of your and your challengers personal experiences. Though I would much rather you addressed the points directly, it nonetheless follows, again, that your own specious contentions can be forestalled by the same mean in which you address them, to wit: have you seen one of these marvellous vehicles going up in the sky; how often have you looked for them in a clear, dark sky; do you have records of any such observation and could they be corroborated and confirms, and if so how exactly? Be truthful now!

Astronomers use various means to attend to the local and wider cosmological environment, and routinely observe things which are beyond the direct perceptual capacities, and therefore beyond the direct experience, of humans. Yet, even from Earth, armed with nothing but a clear sky and sturdily secured pair of high-quality binoculars we can observe objects such as asteroids in the shadow of Jupiter even though they emit no light or energy - their passage across a field of view is discernible and mapped by what they occlude. And astronomy is an endeavour not just limited to tenured scientists, engineers, and their assistants, but as a field it benefits significantly from the contributions of a huge, and proportionally much larger, number of enthusiastic armatures in every part of the globe. The sky is a surveilled domain - this issue is not whether I've seen these mysterious travellers or not, but why nobody has seen them.

Now perhaps you are tempted to suggested that the cool-sounding Mach Tractors are designed in such a way as to avoid detection from any observation point on the Earth or in near-orbit, and that the technologies employed are so sophisticated that even the unavoidable, not to mention spectacular, ionisation of the upper atmosphere caused by friction can be, somehow, suppressed or avoided; that the motive forces generated by such machines do not employ the principles of thrust and therefore produce no emissions; that the manufacture of components, and the assembly and maintenance of theses vehicles is completely untraceable, perhaps having no impact on resource and commodity movements or markets, or maybe not even being drawn from resource stocks found on Earth. All these reasons would, surely, explain why no trace of these advanced manufactured items has been, or will ever become, apparent?

However, to say such things would be to erect an unrealisable assertion, like invoking super-natural powers or magick, one which ill-serves your own claims - for if the lauded Mach Tractor is so advances as to be invisible to us in every respect then on what basis do you, dear Galaxian, stake a claim for their existence? Don't hold back now - you are among friends.

You third and fourth interjections rely on that other well-established discursive tactic so prevalent among conspiracy theorists and ideologues of every strip: the fallacy of presuming your conclusion in your premise. To cut a long story short, because the nurse is due shortly to attend to my sores, you presume the existence of advanced technologies and compare and assert that those who employ them have advanced or evolved beyond humans to the same extent or degree that we have evolved and advanced beyond our biological brethren the chimpanzee. By this you offer us insight into their motivation and our status in relation to them, and entreat us to believe without even so much as a hint of any reasonable, rational support that these things even exist in the first place. A better setting for errant rectum-custard of this magnitude is in a work of fiction or fantasy as such forms allow the imagination to range widely and freely without the necessary encumbrances of evidences and rational argument.

In your final remarks you relieve yourself, figuratively speaking of course, of the burden of supporting your own claims, and by so doing you stymie the tentative process of elevating them from their pitiful status of wishful fantasies. You implore us to take your utterances as 'information', as a means to us 'persuading ourselves' in the manner so familiar to those snake oil sellers commonly referred to as religious authorities: "This thing is true. Believe me. Trust me. First you have to want to believe. All you need is Faith. The evidence is all around you - you only have to look for it."

Confabulation on this scale may work for and on feeble-minded dolts, but for most of us belief in the veracity of a claims follows from some reasoned, rational, and therefore compelling, evidence in support of those claims. It is wholly irrational, not mention wholly unreasonable (in every sense), to believe first and then cast around for something, anything, that looks like evidence for it - particularly when all that is being brought to the table are circular arguments and magical thinking. Frankly, your entire conjecture is beyond a joke, and if you think it passes for diligent inquiry and a sound, supported, rigorous, rational conclusion then the joke, such that it is, is on you.

As you chose to begin your rejoiner with The Bard of Avon it seems only fitting that I should conclude this missive in a similar manner.

• Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
  To the last syllable of recorded time;
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
  Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
  And then is heard no more. It is a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.
  
  
  • -- Shakespeare, Macbeth

No chance of Galaxian seeing the errors of his ways, though. His fixation on confabulations of the conspiratorial kind is pathological.