Are we all DNA testing machines for the aliens?

I get all these weird thoughts in my sleep. Last night I had this thought that all the creatures on earth are actually just meant to test out different DNAs. Aliens use earth as a test bed for their DNA technology. On earth they can also study how these DNA driven machines interact with each other.  Evolution is the adjustments they make to our DNA after learning from their mistakes over a long period of time.
  That partly explains why they periodically wipe out majority of life forms on earth. They do that to get rid of the DNA they didn't like and make room for newer DNA that they want to experiment with.

How to study (tips for effective learning)

Being a software engineer, I have to study all the time. I will present in this article some tips that I have gathered over 3 decades as a student and as a software professional.

• Take genuine interest in what you learn. This is THE most important point. Without this you will never learn, you will only remember.
• Reason and be curious. If some book gives you the formula to calculate compound interest, try to understand why that formula is correct. Derive it yourself and see if you reach the same conclusion as they do. Think of the places where you can apply it in your real life.
• Try to get a 10,000 feet bird's eye view before getting into the details. When I study, one of the first things I do is ask, what am I trying to solve here? What is the purpose of this? How would I explain this in a summary? Once I am sure of that, the studying becomes a lot more interesting and effective.
• Read from multiple sources. For example if you are tying to learn calculus, go to amazon.com. Search for books on calculus and sort it by popularity. Buy the top 2 books. Reading from 2 or more books gives you a view of the subject from multiple angles.
• Try to put in atleast 2 hours of studying everyday. In my experience I grasp more by studying 2 hours for 5 days than studying 10 hours in one day. Its easier to digest and assimilate all that information when its spread out over a period of time.
• Revise: When I study for the first time, I almost always forget it after a few months. So what I do is I write notes when I study the first time. Then after a few months I try to see how much I remember. Then I go over my notes to recollect what I studied in the past. (Google spacing effect)
• Get a good 8 hours sleep every night. Your productivity and learning ability throughout the day depends greatly on how well rested you are. 
• Step away every once in a while. What I do is, if someday if I feel worn out, I just drop everything and go to a movie or the beach. Maybe even take a couple of days off and go hiking. Once I do that, when I get back I am all energised and enthusiastic for my next endeavor.
•  Surround yourself with people who make you happy and stay away from negative people. Good friends will encourage you and support you, bad friends will pull you down.
• Take good care of your health. A healthy mind in a healthy body.

What happened to Atlantis Island?

People of Atlantis found out that everything all life does comes down to interaction between the tiniest particles of matter. For example, you put 2 hydrogen and one oxygen atom together, you get a water molecule. You put two water molecules together, surface tension attracts them to each other. Once they realized that nothing anyone does is in anyone's control and the entire future is guaranteed to take one particular path, they lost all hope in life. Then they decided that future humans should not find this out. To prevent that from happening, they altered the state in a way that humans stay preoccupied fighting each other. Once that happens we will be too distracted to realize this unfortunate fact of the universe. The invention of religion was also for the same reason, to prevent losing hope.

Once the people of Atlantis did what they had to, they removed all traces of their existence and then assimilated with the other humans who were not a part of the advanced Atlantis. However one thing the people of Atlantis didn't realize is that, all living creatures store some information in an encoded form in their DNA. That's the reason we sometimes know something even though we don't know why we know it.

Cultural learnings of an Indian immigrant to the US

 Indians were among the first to come out of the hunter gatherer stage. We had an advanced civilization  back in 3000 BC (Indus valley civilization). We had literature back in 1500BC (Vedas). We were in the forefront of human development up until a few hundred years ago. That's when we  reached a stage where we divided and started fighting among ourselves. As a nation we became very weak. That led to foreign invasions, starting with Mahmud of Ghazni around 1000AD ending with the British colonial rule in 1947. Even though it has been many decades since the independence, we still haven't pulled ourselves out of the muck that we are in right now. Think about this, after the devastating second world war, the Germans were not far ahead of where we were in 1947. But they managed to develop a positive culture and find their way out of it. We on the other hand remain to be a predominantly poor nation where our major focus remains to be putting each other down. To help address some root social problems in our nation, I will be presenting my top 6 observations as an Indian immigrant to the US and juxtaposition them with our culture in India.

1>Independent thinking is strongly encouraged in this country

One would wonder, why in spite of having such a large IT force, no major IT innovation has ever come out of India. In this case, we can't even use lack of infrastructure as an excuse, because it took nothing more than a computer and internet access to start off companies like Google and Facebook. That is something every IT professional in India has access to. Here are my 2 cents on the cause.
   While attending school in India, I was taught to accept the words of my teacher as words of God and never question them. Of the few times that I do remember questioning them as a little boy, I even more strongly remember the physical pain that followed. After growing up, I remember this time, when a professor from an external college had come over to take our viva exams. He asked this one question to a guy (luckily he was not me), to which he didn't get the answer he expected. He told the student what the right answer was. The student protested and gave his reason for why he thought his answer was correct. He also made the mistake of pointing out the fault in the professor's argument. The professor admonished the student for questioning him and also told him to go out and inform all the other students of the "correct answer" to the question. If they say anything else, the professor would fail them like he was about to fail him.
    This was not one of a kind incident. All through out my schooling I had to take things for granted without knowing why they were true. If you were Einstein attending school in India, you would probably never graduate. The reason being, you are expected to give the "right answer" in the "right way". If you solve a math problem in a way different from what they expect from you, you fail. By the time a student gets through 18 years of this conformation enforcement formal education system, all creativity is more or less dead.  That is why in spite of having such a large IT force, no major innovations have ever come out of that country. We never think outside the box.
   When I attended school (Master's program) in US, I totally fell in love with their education system. Contrary to the Indian examination system, where you would try solve as many of the past question papers as possible and try to ace this game called exam, instead here the focus is on learning the subject and putting that knowledge to some practical use. Most of the grading here is based on course projects where you actually build stuff based on what you learned. Even in schools like Harvard, where you have Nobel laureates working as professors, students still analyze and question everything they are taught. They might come to the same conclusion as their professor, but they get there on their own, instead of being forced there.

2>Genius is not confined to math and science

In India right from a very young age extraordinary amount stress is placed on math and science. One of my co workers who was raised in India like I was, wants his daughter to be an engineer. He claims only engineers and doctors are smart. Other fields are for the people with a lower level of Intelligence. This mentality in my opinion is another one of the reasons that we are far behind the developed nations. The customer service in India is deplorable. All the movies have the same story.  Most Indian politicians are cheap low life thugs. The online version of the major news papers, like "Times of India" for instance, have criminally horrible editing.( Every single time they mention rape, they put quotes around it!!! After all these years they still don't realize that quotes mean so called.) All this wouldn't had been the case if we had smart people being able to branch out into disciplines outside science, without the social stigma.
    Every one is born with a different talent. In US every field is considered important. You have really smart people (US president Barack Obama for instance) taking up non science related disciplines in college. Many of them go on to be outstanding in the disciplines they choose.


3>Being interested in politics is good thing

When I was in India, most people considered politics a field for the bad people. No decent person would want anything to do with it. And guess what? We barely have any decent people in politics for the same reason.
     In US being involved in politics is considered a patriotic obligation of every citizen. They start getting involved in rallies and campaigns from a very young age. They realize that they shouldn't vote for individuals who would cater to their own selfish needs over the needs of the nation. They also realize that contesting in elections is one of the best ways to serve the nation. Clinton, Bush and Obama are all Ivy league graduates. How many IIM/IIT grads do we know of, who have become the prime ministers of India?


4>Every individual life matters

When I used to live in Mumbai, I remember seeing these severely malnourished kids begging on the side walk with their ribs sticking out. Its no secret that gangsters own these kids and they share the loot with the local cops. They feed the kid just enough so that he can live long enough to beg another day.
      When Jessica Lal got murdered the whole nation got behind a campaign to get her justice. But no one seems to care about all the little kids who get exploited everyday on the streets of India. Why? Because we do not care about the poor people.
    US on the other hand cares for every one of her citizens. If you are a US citizen who gets kidnapped in the forests of Amazon, the president himself will get involved. If you are physically challenged and cannot earn a living, the government sends you a paycheck every month. If you are kid, the government makes sure that you are well fed and get a good education. Every single individual kid born in this nation has a fair shot at success, if he/she has the will to do so.  Giving importance to every individual life has helped them to become a nation of strong individuals which in turn led to becoming a strong nation.


5>Anger is a sign of the weak

Most of our Bollywood movies, especially the ones with Salman and Shahrukh Khan, have notoriously glamorized anger. We idolize Sunny Deol, when he throws a person across the room for insulting him. When this plays out in real life, we have people attacking each other for the flimsiest of reasons. Its not uncommon to read news articles where people kill each other in road rage or over a cricket match. When travelling in the local trains in Mumbai, fists fights are a very common occurrence. For us fighting like street dogs, is the answer to all our problems.
     The concept here is, if you lose your temper, its because you are a weak individual who knows no other way to deal with his problems. If you ever lose temper in public, you are immediately ostracized. Kids here learn this from a very young age. Early in life, they learn to express their disagreements through speech instead of fists. As a result, most of them grow up to have amazing debating skills.


6>Reward works better than punishment

In India at most work places the boss scares you into getting the job done either by threatening or insulting until he gets what he wants. In the western world the threatening is replaced by the enticement of rewards. You get praised and rewarded for a job well done. Most psychologists agree that honest praise works far better than criticism. In the western world human behaviour tendencies are given a lot of importance. We Indians on the other hand have created a system where we treat humans like robots. We fail to realize that without appealing positively to the emotional part of the human brain, it is hard to motivate people.


Even though most us from India conveniently attribute all our problems to our oversized 1 Billion plus population, the bitter truth is, that's just a comfortable lie that politicians want us to believe. Until we address these root problems, we will forever be damned to remain as a developing nation.

The ways our world could end tomorrow

These are the most likely scenarios that could happen

1>A proxy war between the world powers escalates into a full blown nuclear war . Neither side is willing to back down. The war doesn't stop until near total annihilation of both sides. Regardless of whether a nuclear bomb is dropped on your country or not, the nuclear fall out of  a war on such a scale, will affect the entire world. All future generations would be born with genetic defects. This could lead to the eventual loss of intelligence and the dying out of the entire human species. The whole process could take less than a few hundred years.

2>If a flu virus with the survival instinct of HIV emerges, such that it keeps the host healthy and oblivious long enough to be able to transmit but not too long, it is just a matter of few years that most humans get wiped out. How ever such a scenario may not lead to the total destruction of humans. There are un contacted tribes of people (Sentinelese people for example). Due to their isolation from mainland humans, they might survive such an event. (It is possible that the existing humans today survived such an event 70,000 years ago)

3>Eruption of the super volcano in yellowstone national park.  This super volcano which spans the area of the whole yellow stone national park, has a history of erupting every 600,000 years or so. The last one was around 640,000 years ago. According to the scientists the next eruption is already overdue. This could even be tomorrow! If this happens, most of North America would be wiped out. The resulting ash and debris released into the air by this unimaginably gigantic volcano, would block out the sun for the entire planet. This would lead to destruction of harvest and a global cooling of about 10 degree Celsius. Mankind would survive but the world wouldn't the same anymore.

Have we been visited by Aliens?

Based on archaeological findings, we have an idea on the history of evolution. We know about the Dinosaurs and the creatures that came and left before and after them. But what seems interesting is that every dominant creature rules for a few million years and then gets wiped out to make way for the next. This leads me to two questions
1> Is the whole earth an alien experimental ground?
2> Are we next?

 Life on earth developed into complex forms about 3.5 Billion years after its formation. So keeping in mind that the universe is 14 Billion years old, it is possible that intelligent life forms developed else where in the universe about 3.5 Billion years after it formation, which is about 10 Billion years ago. Even if a handful of these survived (looking at the enormous size of the universe, it is very probable) beyond wars and asteroids, they would be 10 Billion years ahead of us in technology! My tiny brain can't even begin to imagine what that technology would be like. What I feel is that, earth was visited by Aliens at around 4 Billion years ago and then started this experiment, where the visiting aliens released these DNA programmed creatures into the earth and saw how it played out. And time to time, they do a reset by wiping out the dominant species for the next stage of the experiment to begin. Like the robots we build are not aware of our presence, similarly is it possible that the creatures on earth are not intelligent enough to recognize this higher power? Or is it that humans had an inkling of this higher power which led to the misguided creation of the religions? Maybe the aliens are not even physical beings. Its probably an existence that influences our physical world but has no physical form that we understand.

Some  random facts that support my theory

• Our only purpose in life seems to be the replication of our DNA and the traits that were introduced in us over history due to the influence of our DNA (If you think about it, the creatures, the various cultures, none of it would had existed, had it not been for the existence of DNA). 
• Human ancestors were like any other animal. Then around 100,000 years ago  the creature that was barely distinguishable from the other animals, started increasing its intelligence at an exponential pace. Fast forward into the present, we fly to space and land on the moon.  A change like that in 100,000 years is instantaneous in relation to the 3.8 Billion years of the evolution of life. It seems plausible that an external catalyst could have been present.

Is all future destiny?

All matter is ultimately composed of atoms (which in turn is composed of sub atomic particles, which in turn is a concentrated form of energy). Humans like anything else is a configuration of atoms.  Everything we do, is the atoms in us following laws of physics. You keep two oxygen atoms together, they combine to form O2. You introduce some other atom into the picture, there would some preset predictable interaction there too. Put many of them together in a particular order, they form single celled living organism. Every single thing we do, including me typing is an interaction of the tiniest building blocks of matter and pure energy. All our future including who you would meet tomorrow and where you will go is probably preset based on laws of inter atomic interactions.  Good and bad can be thought of as a formation of atoms in our brain (so called perception) due to an interaction with the  atoms/energy outside the brain.

If everything is purely inter atomic/energy interaction, then all future is destiny.