The Road to Nibiru
After a fireball was observed streaking across the Southwestern sky “local radio broadcasts immediately began receiving calls, many from people who were driving to work, with some asking whether the fireball in the sky could be a sign that the fabled Mayan Prophecy has begun.” In order to prevent an outbreak of panic among those susceptible to it NASA is turning to social media platforms to let people know that the Apocalypse has not been definitely scheduled for December 21.
Not everyone is so sure we’re safe. According to the Daily Telegraph, some people in Russia stocked up on survival supplies after “a newspaper article, supposedly written by a Tibetan monk, confirmed the end of the world.”
Some in China are taking the prospect of Armageddon seriously with panic buying of candles reported in Sichuan province.
The source of the panic was traced to a post on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, predicting that there will be three days of darkness when the apocalypse arrives.
One grocery store owner said: “At first, we had no idea why. But then we heard someone muttering about the continuous darkness.”
If one particular analysis of historical records is accurate then according to the MIT Technology Review the real Nibiru missed the earth back in 1883 when a billion-ton comet scraped past the planet almost unobserved. “Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City … estimate that these objects must have ranged in size from 50 to 800 metres across and that the parent comet must originally have tipped the scales at a billion tons or more, that’s huge, approaching the size of Halley’s comet.”
Manterola and co end their paper by spelling out just how close Earth may have come to catastrophe that day. They point out that Bonilla observed these objects for about three and a half hours over two days. This implies an average of 131 objects per hour and a total of 3275 objects in the time between observations.
Each fragment was at least as big as the one thought to have hit Tunguska. Manterola and co end with this: “So if they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event.”
Wikipedia points out that the End of the World has come several times before. “Since life began on Earth, several major mass extinctions have significantly exceeded the background extinction rate. The most recent, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which occurred approximately 65.5 million years ago. … In a landmark paper published in 1982, Jack Sepkoski and David M. Raup identified five mass extinctions”.
That doesn’t even count the minor extinctions. Thus, from one point of view, the Apocalypse is not only coming, it’s been around the block a few times already. There is even some debate over whether such extinctions are periodic or follow some kind of distribution. Some scientists even think they can predict them. National Geographic reports “a new study [which] suggests that global warming could threaten one-fourth of the world’s plant and vertebrate animal species with extinction by 2050.”
You shouldn’t be out buying candles. You should be buying carbon credits.
But there’s hope for the species. SBS says “a ‘super Earth’ that could have a life-supporting climate has been discovered in a multi-world solar system 42 light years from the Sun.” That’s close enough for a multigenerational starship to reach.
The planet, which is several times more massive than the Earth, lies just the right distance from its star to allow the existence of liquid surface water.
It orbits well within the star’s “habitable” or “Goldilocks” zone – the region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold to sustain life.
The new world is one of six, all with masses a few times that of the Earth, believed to circle the dwarf star HD 40307 in the constellation Pictor.
In case you think such ideas are wholly out of this world, think again. A company called the Golden Spike “a new company run by former NASA executives announced that it will send you to the moon by 2020 — for a mere $1.5 billion.” President Obama is not impressed.
President Barack Obama cancelled NASA’s planned return to the moon, saying America had already been there. On Wednesday, a National Academy of Sciences said the nation’s space agency has no clear goal or direction for future human exploration. …
The firm has talked to other countries, which are showing interest, said former NASA associate administrator Alan Stern, Golden Spike’s president. Stern said he’s looking at countries like South Africa, South Korea, and Japan. One very rich individual — he won’t give a name — has also been talking with them, but the company’s main market is foreign nations, he said.
Obama’s not interested. But if it makes money he’ll find a way to tax it.
Golden Spike’s trip to the moon won’t get you as far as Pictor, though perhaps you can hitchhike the rest of the way from there. Maybe this is how it was when our ancestors looked out across to the next valley. For there is a restlessness in man compounded both of ancient fear and ancient hope that keeps him moving, driven by the inner conviction that to stop is to die. Present in every loving glimpse of home lies the presentiment that we are doomed to leave it; that it must take its place in memory. In its original meaning the word ‘Apocalypse’ never meant the end of things. It meant the time when things would be revealed and the next valley came into view.
Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me
As they rove around the girth
Of our lovely mother planet
Of the cool, green hills of Earth.We’ve tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet —We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
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I will worry when the Jubal Harshaws of the world stop selling candles to the gullible and pack their own bags.
For those thinking of more pleasant trips, and by a stretch tying in some running themes if not gags or at least dragging in the Middle East, I offer Bob and Bing in “The Road to Morocco.”
I won’t be baited.
Nice quotation from Rhysling/Heinlein. In his Timeline, Heinlein envisioned a period when world turmoil would cause space travel to cease for many years. We may be seeing that now. Twelve men walked on the moon. they may be the only ones – at least for a very long time.
So the world’s going to end Dec. 21. That’s just great. My first SS check is due Feb. 13. Oh well, I stopped believing in the Tooth Fairy a long time ago.
If one particular analysis of historical records is accurate then according to the MIT Technology Review the real Niburu missed the earth back in 1883 when a billion-ton comet scraped past the planet almost unobserved.
I’m with the second comment there, this report does not compute, there’s no way a parallax story runs from just one location on Earth for two days! And would also have necessarily been accompanied by humongous meteor showers.
http://www.electricferret.com/fights/cosmicpower.htm
Doesn’t mean it won’t happen, cuz it will, unless we detect and deter it, but the Mayans didn’t forecast it for 1883 and it didn’t happen.
BTW – what does a Mayan calendar look like anyway, that circular one we all know and love is Aztec, isn’t it? I thought the Mayan one was a big square of some kind, if I’ve ever seen it at all.
There is a novel about Earth getting hit with multiple impacts in 1878, entitled The Peshawar Lancers. Richly detailed and pretty logically thought out, it describes how the British Empire was forced to relocate its “headquarters” and much of its population to India, which of course it already “owned.”
The evidence for habitable planets being pretty common is fairly convincing. Even ignoring the latest telescope data, in our solar system we at one time had a least two. Mars looks like it was habitable in human terms before it got whacked very hard by something that blew off the top half like lifting half the skin off an orange. Some of Jupiter’s moons look pretty interesting as well.
“We have been to the moon we are not going back” >Barack Hussein Obama POTUS United States of America<
Not quite John F. Kennedy in that remark was he?
The gods will say hiya
According to Maya
Whose calendar tells us the tale
Of when the world’s ending
The date it is pending
And ends with a sigh not a wail
But there’s a distinction
Between mass extinction
And darkness three nights in a row
And while I can handle
Dim light from a candle
I much prefer bright light to low
But then just consider
How sad and quite bitter
We’d be if an asteroid struck
I wouldn’t be lyin’
Catastrophe Mayan
Would just be my kind of bad luck
Extra points and credit for working in Green Hills of Earth!
However, you lose points for not getting to the Beyønd the Fringe End of the World sketch:
Dudley: And will this wind be so mighty as to lay low the mountains of the earth?
Peter :No – it will not be quite as mighty as that – that is why we have come up on the mountain, you stupid nit – to be safe from it. Up here on the mountain we shall be safe – safe as houses.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hJQ18S6aag
“The evidence for habitable planets being pretty common is fairly convincing” @ 6 Yep, this is what made Frank Herbert’s Dune so interesting. Aside from some genetically engineered exotic breeds of ‘old Terra’ animals and the sandworms, what else was there but mankind expanding out into an infinite universe? Every other sci-fi universe had aliens, to my knowledge…
“We have been to the moon we are not going back” >Barack Hussein Obama
What if Columbus had said the same thing about the New World?
But we have an excellent reason to go back.
“The moon’s surface is full of the energy source helium-3, said Gerald Kulcinski, a nuclear engineering professor and director of the Fusion Technology Institute at UW.
“If we could land the space shuttle on the moon, fill the cargo with canisters of helium-3 mined from the surface and bring the shuttle back to Earth, that cargo would supply the entire electrical power needs of the United States for an entire year,” he said.
The moon is also going to be the logical ‘port’ for exploration of the solar system. Turns out the asteroid belt contains incredible mineral wealth. NASA estimates “that the mineral wealth resident in the belt of asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter would be equivalent to about 100 billion dollars for every person on Earth today.”
Ironically, “the comets and asteroids that are potentially the most hazardous because they can closely approach the Earth are also the objects that could be most easily exploited for their raw materials.”
There are also huge advantages to factory refining and fabrication on the moon.
“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.” Robert Heinlein
It seems to me that there is equally compelling evidence for no life anywhere else in the universe.
Where are they, anyway?
I am not convinced that “they” exist. I’m very agnostic on the notion. Virtually atheistic.
Maybe … just maybe … we’re the first. The ones that other lifeforms will write THEIR science fiction novels about. The BEMs (hi, Walt!) that invade THEIR planets.
Boff if that catastrophe must happen, what can we do against it? just wait an see !
We can’t monitor things that don’t depend on our will (ie Epitetus)
Wait, what? The Mayans said the world would end on December 21? Okay, who is postponing their Christmas shopping until December 22 just in case?
I’m seriously befuddled over the Chinese and Russians stocking up on supplies for TEOTWAWKI. I thought the Mayan thing was more like the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Hopefully without hippies.
“My dear boy,you don’t think that a civilization that has developed interstellar travel is going to communicate by anything so slow and as crude as radio waves do you?”
Swamp Woman @ 15: It’s not only the Mayan calendar thing — have you forgotten that Dick Clark died this year too? It’s an omen. There will be no ball dropping in Times square in three weeks. Heck, there will be no Times Square!
“President Barack Obama cancelled NASA’s planned return to the moon, saying America had already been there. ”
Let’s go ahead and cancel his Christmas trip to Hawaii. He’s already been there.
2012 is not the end of the world, Mayan elder insists
9:49PM BST 11 Oct 2009
The year 2012 will not bring the end of the world, a Mayan elder has insisted, despite claims that a Mayan calendar shows that time will “run out” on December 21 of that year.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6300744/2012-is-not-the-end-of-the-world-Mayan-elder-insists.html
/////////////////////////////
What the Mayan Elders are Saying About 2012 by Carlos Barrios
http://www.seri-worldwide.org/id435.html
Carlos Barrios, Mayan elder and Ajq’ij (is a ceremonial priest and spiritual guide) of the Eagle Clan. Carlos initiated an investigation into the different Mayan calendars circulating. Carlos along with his brother Gerardo studied with many teachers and interviewed nearly 600 traditional Mayan elders to widen their scope of knowledge.
Carlos found out quickly there were several conflicting interpretations of Mayan hieroglyphs, petroglyphs, Sacred Books of ‘Chilam Balam’ and various ancient text. Carlos found some strong words for those who may have contributed to the confusion:
Carlos Barrios: “Anthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. It’s just their imagination. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.”
“We are no longer in the World of the Fourth Sun, but we are not yet in the World of the Fifth Sun. This is the time in-between, the time of transition. As we pass through transition there is a colossal, global convergence of environmental destruction, social chaos, war, and ongoing Earth Changes.”
Wretchard said:
“SBS says “a ‘super Earth’ that could have a life-supporting climate has been discovered in a multi-world solar system 42 light years from the Sun.” That’s close enough for a multigenerational starship to reach.”
5% speed-of-light is a very optimistic top speed with credible technology (deuterium fusion). To travel 42 light years means 840 years in interstellar space. It’s doubtful that any credible technology could tolerate whacking into interstellar dust at 5% the speed-of-light for 840 years (the spacecraft would erode away to nothing). The Centauri system is credible. Maybe even Tau Ceti but anything beyond that in one trip is fantasy.
Wretchard also said:
“A company called the Golden Spike “a new company run by former NASA executives announced that it will send you to the moon by 2020 — for a mere $1.5 billion.” President Obama is not impressed.”
I’d give it about a 95% probable that Golden Spike is a scam. The Russians have talked about offering lunar flybys for about $50 million to bored billionaires (supposedly James Cameron expressed interest). The Russians could do this by mounting a modified version of their Soyuz capsule on their Proton booster. The Soyuz design originated as the Zond spacecraft that successfully flew biological payloads around the Moon and back (tortoises). Flying to the Moon and back in a Soyuz would be incredibly dangerous and uncomfortable (like being couped in a Volkswagen beetle for a week). The reward beyond the bragging rights would be to see the lunar far side with your own eyes and having the crap scared out of you as you pulled 8gs during reentry. Actually landing on the moon is out of the question. The big ticket items in Apollo were:
1) Saturn-V booster
2) Apollo Command module (CM)
3) Lunar Module (lander).
The Russians have the poor man’s equivalent to the Saturn-V (Proton) and the Apollo-CM (Soyuz) but they never cracked the problem of the lunar lander. Developing a functioning lunar lander from a clean piece of paper would cost billions of dollars. I doubt that even Space-X could do it for less than a billion assuming they made a build-to-print design from the original Grumman lunar module.
13. SBW (aka Roughcoat)
I’m absolutely convinced that the universe is teeming with life based on one personal observation and one scientific fact.
On a dark night I can look at the stars and I know that what I see is just a tiny fraction of the galaxy. I also know that the Milky Way is only one among uncounted billions of galaxies. If only one star out of a hundred has an earthlike planet that still is alot of possibilities.
Nearly everywhere on earth scientists have looked they have found life. Two miles deep in South African gold mines bacteria have been found living in the rocks. A saline lake under the ice in Antarctica has been found to harbor at least one form of bacteria. Hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor host a myriad of life forms living on hydrogen sulfide and probably each other in water hot enough to cook me and maybe even a Roughcoat like you.
What exactly is life and what is intelligence? Are there life forms on earth we don’t recognize as such. Rivers are born , mature and they die, some faster than others, but even the short lived ones have a life span rivaling any patriarch in the bible. A bonfire starts as a tiny flare, consumes increasing amounts of oxygen as it matures and dies as a pile of ash no longer exhaling toxic CO2. It can even be put on life support by adding brush or killed with a water hose. Are these examples of life? Above my pay grade at the moment. If I find out in the future I’ll let you know.
And intelligence, what’s that? I would define intelligence as the ability to learn based on observation and experience. And based on that that definition alone, I’ve seen more than a few examples of four legged critters displaying intelligence at least equal to some of my fellow humans. I saw a pig one time that wanted something on the other side of an electric gate. He had food, water, shelter and anything else he needed on his side of the gate but he wanted something on the other side. He had enough understanding of electricity to know that gate was going to hurt him. He stood back about fifteen feet and squealed like he was already getting his throat cut at the packing plant and then he charged thru the gate. I put him back in the pen. What did he want? I don’t know. Maybe freedom.
Enough rambling.I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t be so certain we’er alone. They may be polka dot or pink or even black and look a little strange but somewhere out there we’ve probably have neighbors.
Michael Crichton debunks this cozy religious attitude:
” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.
As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion.
Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered.There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/09/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-caltech-lecture-by-michael-crichton/
bob @ 21 said:
“Two miles deep in South African gold mines bacteria have been found living in the rocks.”
I’ve been at the stope face of a South African mine (East Rand Proprietary). The Witwatersrand reef is actually an ancient lake bed that existed during the Precambrian era (no free oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere). Even then there was biology on this planet (anaerobic metabolism). People make a big deal that there maybe biology in Lake Vostok. However Antarctica was once covered with rain forests (has huge coal seams). Lake Vostok like that ancient lake bed under Johannesberg was once teaming with ordinary life forms. Is it any wonder that life slowly evolved into more exotic/survivable forms as the Witwatersrand reef went under ground or Lake Vostok was covered with ice?
$64,000 question: Can life exist in an environment that has no prior history of being hospitable, e.g. the surface of Mars?
vanderleun @ 22 said:
“Michael Crichton debunks this cozy religious attitude..”
Crichton was a wise man. He immediately spotted anthropogenic global warming as a political scam.
“… the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero.”
Drake’s equation is caca. Most of the constants in Drake’s equation are either unknown and/or unknowable. The constants can range from zero to infinity. Carl Sagan was way over-rated (he was a big promoter of Drake’s equation). Sagan was more of a two bit hustler scrounging for MSM face time than a genuine scientist.
My descriptions of rivers and fire in the post above were taken from “The Seven Mysteries of Life” by Guy Murchie. Paraphrased I hope, and not plagerized. It is a good book if you need questions to ponder.
I have followed this quest for meaning and the search for life in the universe. Are we not alone, are we alone? Well, it is interesting, but all the theories to get tiring after decades of living. My favorite story of creation still comes back to this:
The world was made in six days and finished on the seventh,
According to the contract, it should have been the eleventh;
But the painters wouldn’t paint and the workers wouldn’t work,
So the quickest thing to do was fill it in with dirt.
23. Eggplant
Thanks for that information. I knew it was called a reef but never actually took the time to find out why. The Homestake Mine in S. Dak. also had Precambrian reefs if I remember right. I haven’t heard of any critters there but it’s been a long time since since I had my thirty minute geology lecture on it and at that stage of my life I wasn’t asking many questions or even paying attention.
Your $64,000 question: Yes, although I wouldn’t want to go to Mars Mayflower style.
Send check to_____
My $64,000 question: Can life evolve into being in an environment without a water medium, e.g. Titan? I don’t have any knowledge of the properties of liquid methane but it’s probably much like gasoline which I know dissolves many substances including some I didn’t want it to. So it could possibly serve as medium for some form of life.
All I really know is when we begin encountering alien life forms it’s going to be just that–alien, most of it very very alien. Some we won’t even recognize as life and some probably won’t recognize us as life either.
Bob @ 26,
It would be less boring being cooped in a Mars colonist ship than the Mayflower. At least one could play video games in a Mars colonist ship or post comments to Belmont Club. If I could take my family with me, I’d go…
Bob said:
“My $64,000 question: Can life evolve into being in an environment without a water medium, e.g. Titan? I don’t have any knowledge of the properties of liquid methane but it’s probably much like gasoline which I know dissolves many substances including some I didn’t want it to. So it could possibly serve as medium for some form of life.”
It’s really cold on Titan, i.e. water is “rock” on Titan. Could liquid methane serve as a substitute for water?
I’ll expose my ignorance to ridicule. If I dissolve common salt (NaCl) in water, I’ll have sodium and chlorine ions in solution. Will salt even dissolve in liquid methane? Assuming it will dissolve, will it form ions in solution? If the answer is “no” then that prohibits a major chemical process that drives biology.
I suspect that most of the biologically interesting chemical reactions that occurs in water will not occur in liquid methane. It would be interesting for a chemist or chemical engineer to chime in about now…..
Bob also said:
“The Homestake Mine in S. Dak. also had Precambrian reefs if I remember right. ”
I read somewhere that iron pyrite (fools gold) plays a role in the mineralization of gold. You almost always find fools gold with real gold. The grey conglomerate that makes up the Witwatersrand reef has a fair amount of iron pyrite in it. Supposedly most of the world’s iron pyrite precipitated out of solution after free oxygen appeared in the Earth’s atmosphere. Consequently I would not be surprised if the Homestake mine had Precambrian rock with lots of iron pyrite. Where this reasoning breaks down is California has plenty of gold but Precambrian rocks are rare in California. Maybe the mineralization mechanism was different (alternate mechanism is gold dissolved in super heated liquid water under high pressure). Time for a geologist to step in….
20 @Eggplant
Ablative ice shield strapped on to the front of the craft. That’s what Clarke suggested in The Songs of Distant Earth (I think that was the book). Yeah, that’s even more mass to push, but it’s more realistic than the Enterprise’s deflector dish.
22 @vanderleun
The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science.
You made a huge leap of logic that is completely unsupported. SETI != The Drake Equation, nor is it predicated on it. There is a null hypothesis (intelligent life in the universe is nonexistent or undetectable by us) and there are tests against it. One detection negates the null hypothesis.
I do agree the the Drake Equation is worthless as a scientific tool, but I don’t think that Drake even meant it to be used that way. IIRC, he intended it to be used as a tool to get others thinking about all of the wildly different factors that can have an effect on the possibility of life arising. It was seized upon by popular science promoters (like Sagan mentioned above) as some kind of real algorithm, when it was really created in the Einstein tradition of the Gedankenexperiment.
This reminds me: I saw a bolide meteor falling on Broadway, in New York City, last year (or was it the year before?).
Anyway, I was walking south on Broadway, right at 10th Street, and looking downtown, I saw this incredibly brilliant ball of white fire, with bits of white fire breaking off of it, scribe a line from high left, above the wall of buildings lining Broadway, almost straight down but a bit to the right, apparently driving right into the street canyon! It reminded me of the brilliant white glare of the children’s sparklers we used to light on the Fourth of July.
It was so astonishing, I just stopped in my tracks, and called out to the nearest pedestrians, “HEY! Did you see THAT?” One woman looked back at me and smiled and nodded; a couple of Asian men just kept walking. I didn’t see anyone else react. It only took a fraction of a second.
Got home; looked online for meteor sightings, and sure enough: a huge fireball, or bolide meteor, had fallen at just that time of night over Virginia, right in the line of sight of lower Broadway. Sucker must have been HUGE for me to see it so clearly in NYC. I swear it looked like a big one landing right in New York Harbor. Incredible.
If doomsday is coming, say your prayers and get right with God, and remember that we’ve all gotta go someday.
PS: for a good sci-fi novel about the end of civilization, try Larry Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer. Published around 1975, about the end of civilization after a comet fragments and strikes Earth in several places (like Shoemaker-Levy would hit Jupiter several years later). Interesting projection.
O/T
Got to see this incredible story (via Instapundit).
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/159363/
(It’ll take your minds off the Mayan calendar….)
Re #27 Eggplant: Our biology wouldn’t work in liquid methane solution. That’s for sure. What we don’t know is whether some completely different set of chemicals and chemical reactions, that would work in liquid methane at -200 C, would lead to a completely different biology. After all, life is a process rather than a specific set of chemicals.
Similar speculations have been made about life in liquid ammonia (which isn’t as different from water chemistry) or even self-sustaining plasma vortices inside stars. Or even on the surface of a neutron star, where conventional chemistry wouldn’t be involved either; for details see the rather good book “Dragon’s Egg” by Bob Forward.
Liquid methane can’t substitute for water for elemental chemical reasons: at such temperatures virtually the entire panoply of molecules are frozen rock solid — and the percentage that could be promoted into an ‘activated complex’ is zilch.
The critical factor for living organisms is sulfur. It was the basis for all ultra primitive life — that before oxygen became available via photosynthesis.
Sulfur chemistry is the boot-loader of life. It’s embedded in our DNA — which uncoil when the local pH changes.
Life can’t exist much beyond 75 C because there is too much free energy — which promotes / cooks everything so fast there’s no stability — no next generation.
=========
Humanity is never going to travel to the stars because we will be able to utterly transform our own Solar System so very much cheaper.
Advances in telescopes are still in their infancy. Within mere centuries, humanity will be able to photograph all of the nearby planets — out to twenty light-years — with those of interest resolved to that of Jupiter, today.
Such is possible by digitally combining imagery from multiple ‘Hubbles’ that have been launched on one-way missions into the cosmos. They can then build up a compound image of even far-distant planets.
A similar technique is already used by our spy birds. One need only amp up the operation 10,000 times. That, and patience, will do the trick.
Such a compounded image will function like an optical lens 100 astronomical units across in terms of resolution. The longer one can dedicate the lenses, the brighter the image.
Compound imaging ought to be first tasked with the asteroid belt. We can prospect it from LEO.
It is my understanding that our star is relatively young. The stars about which the multitude of other earths orbit are much older. If logic still works way out there, I’d therefore expect these other earths – and their occupants – to be much, much older than us. And much, much wiser. They would have encountered the problems of war and want and disease that threaten our existence. But still existing, they would have solved them. Sure wish they’d drop down here some day, tell us how. Or maybe they figure we’re just not worth talking to if we can’t make it out to their place. After this last election, I can’t blame them . . .
The Mayans? Oh, sure. A precocious stone age tribe who could not figure out the wheel nevertheless accurately predicted the end of Earth! Or was it civilization? Their civilization? WTF?
“We have been to the moon we are not going back” >Barack Hussein Obama
Not Columbus, but ending the explorations of Zeng He. Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming government sponsored seven naval expeditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He
However, the bureaucrats of the Ming dynasty saw it as a waste of resources. What had they found that didn’t convince them that all that was needed could be found in the Heavenly Kingdom as all others were but inferior barbarians.
Yet, in one of the big ‘ifs’ of history – what if the Chinese had found the Europeans and opened trade routes before the Europeans had found America? Would this world bear resemblance to what it is today?
SBW #13
Our best current scientific guess, based on Hubble data, is that there are a billion galaxies in our universe. I am sure that everyone knows this is a low estimate, based on our limitations in acquiring data.
Let’s say that intelligent life is an incredibly low probability situation. Say that there is only one intelligent race in each universe. That means there are “only” one billion intelligent races in the universe.
Beverly #29:
The most spectacular meteor I ever saw was under circumstances that were simultaneously excellent and terrible. I was flying a light aircraft over Seminole, OK one night in October 1977. I saw a bright light ahead and at first thought it was the landing light of an airplane. Then, as it’s shape became apparant I thought it was a UFO. Then I realized it was a meteor. It showed a comet-like shape and exploded; the pieces could be seen falling.
But I had just pulled off the power in prepartion for landing, and my instructor reminded me I needed to keep flying the airplane lest the ground rise up and smite us with a vengeance.
I was reminded of that scene at the beginning of the 1952 film The War of the Worlds. But that one blew up, so I guess we got him.
Saw a reference to this http://cometstorm.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/a-different-kind-of-climate-catastrophe-2/ a month or so ago on WUWT. Apparently multiple strike impacts from disintegrating comets are a threat that hasn’t been recognized. Very interesting article by a guy whose background included military bomb damage assessment.
From my reading about the Mayan calendar, the hoopla about the end of the world is a little misguided (though in the case of the United States the timing seems apt). The Mayan calendar is actually composed of three calendars, and the longest period calendar is approaching its “reset” point. But I haven’t read anything credible about an actual prediction that the world would end; just that the long period calendar would start a new cycle.
I think there must be many, many potentially inhabitable planets out there. If we can but find the way to explore them. When I wrote my novel ten years ago the technology I wrote about was really on the fringe. And there hadn’t been that many exoplanets discovered at that time. I’ve been gratified to see that Zero Point Energy and the cloaking I described have actually come more into the main stream. And that a team at NASA is investigating a potential warp drive based on principles very much like what I was describing in my novel. We are on the verge of some major breakthroughs and discoveries. Unfortunately we are also on the verge of throwing it all away.
”Carl Sagan was way over-rated (he was a big promoter of Drake’s equation). Sagan was more of a two bit hustler scrounging for MSM face time than a genuine scientist.”
Thanks you, sir!! I got so sick of that guy on that TV series with those loving profiles and him gazing upward in wonder … bah!!!
It’s not as simple as Carl’s billions and billions. The requirements for complex life are so stringent as only to be possible in a much smaller range of each galaxy than is usually thought, not to mention a much smaller number of suitable planets. Just as the honest and thoughtful atheists had to admit defeat in the face of the Big Bang, anthropism has made a bit of a comeback on the basis of accumulating scientific evidence.
Besides, if a coherent cosmology is directed toward the question of life elsewhere, it’s easy to see that it either is not fallen, and therefore blissfully engaged wherever and whatever it is, or in a mess like we are.
27. Eggplant
If I dissolve common salt (NaCl) in water, I’ll have sodium and chlorine ions in solution. Will salt even dissolve in liquid methane? Assuming it will dissolve, will it form ions in solution? If the answer is “no” then that prohibits a major chemical process that drives biology.
………
I don’t have an answer to the question you posed but I can talk to its premise.
As it happens when the chemists analyze seawater, there are something like 60 trace elements in the seawater. These are all contained in sea salt. but not in say table salt which is just Na Cl.
Interestingly those same 60 trace elements are also contained in the human blood in the same proportions–when diet is at its best.
End of the World? Have an Oreo…
rwe @ 36: Our best current scientific guess, based on Hubble data, is that there are a billion galaxies in our universe.
That’s waaaay low. Based on the deep field picture circa 2009 (?) they raised that way up. Current estimates range from fifty billion to two hundred billion galaxies and possibly much higher.
http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q1120.html
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/10/10/how-many-galaxies-are-there-in-the-universe-the-redder-we-look-the-more-we-see/
Only Douglas Adams had this about right with his Total Perspective Vortex.
–
It seems to me that life must be pretty common in the universe, and I keep looking at the great mass of Jupiter and wondering what all could happen way down in that mix. The question is then about intelligent life, on which we’re still waiting for conclusive results to come in from Lily Tomlin. Then, if there are a million planets with life roughly like us out in this galaxy, are any close enough that we will ever hear from them? And finally, if there are dozens of planets with life wildly more advanced than us, is the universe as convenient a place as to allow them to come and visit and bring their cookbooks, or is that speed of light an absolute limit, and controlled fusion just a pipe dream even for them, no space warps or ZPMs at all? In which case, all they can do is go outside and wave at us, just as we can do for them.
In which case we get to act as if we’re all alone. Eventually we might exploit some comets and asteroids, maybe Mars, maybe spend 100,000 years terraforming Venus, settle a few moons of Jupiter and Saturn and our own as well, set up some Lagrange-point canister cities (built out of old asteroids and moved there over decades), start building huge space-based solar power facilities to run it all, if fusion remains intractable. None of it easy, none of it happening soon. Not a bad universe for scifi, but you need some looong time constants. We’ll all be mutant cyborgs a long time before much of it could be more than started, and that’s the optimistic view.
As I recall, water is a polar molecule, methane is a non polar molecule. Salt, NaCl is a polar compound.
Generally, polar solvents dissolve polar compounds, non-polar solvents dissolve non-polar solvents.
Water will not dissolve many organic compounds, such as oils and fats, so I don’t think that methane would dissolve salt(s). Salts are the product of an acid and a metal and are polar compounds.
Methane based life would probably have to be based on methane molecules being combined into complex hydrocarbons, which happens on Earth both in organic and non-organic reactions. Methane is the simplest hydrocarbon,CH4.
Josh @5:
BTW – what does a Mayan calendar look like anyway, that circular one we all know and love is Aztec, isn’t it? I thought the Mayan one was a big square of some kind, if I’ve ever seen it at all.
The one in question (ending 12/21(or 23)/2012 is a tabular count of days from a starting point of 08/11(or 13)/3114 BC. The square look you refer to is the glyph representations of the counts.
Here: http://mayan-calendar.com/ is a good overview site for details if you want.
jc @ 44: http://mayan-calendar.com/
mayan-calendar.com, well I shoulda, doh!
but they are *selling* a 2013 Mayan calendar?
I – I don’t know what to say! hopefully this is good news.
but it means the Obamanation would continue without any immediate relief.
nice site, actually, thanks!
20. Eggplant and others
Yes, “Golden Spike” might as well be a scam, because it ain’t going to happen by 2020. In the 40 years since Apollo we’ve unlearned how to land humans on the Moon. A circumnavigation service to the Moon by or before 2020 is feasible by commercial ventures, and if Golden Spike has any sense to it, the principals will lower their sites for the near term in order to succeed at all.
As to Obama and space programs: He’s not doing anything differently than any president in his position would do at this time, and he did sign on to COTS, the use of so-called “private sector” launch services meant to substantially decrease the cost of getting into space. Obama didn’t do this because he’s enlightened on the subject, but, nevertheless, he made the right move. IF COTS does succeed in creating lower-cost commercial space launch, it will have a profound effect on mankind’s ability to settle the Solar System. Progress often comes from the most unlikely of quarters.
As to “super Earths?” Fuggedaboudit. The gravitational pull on these planetary surfaces can’t be overcome by the strongest powerlifters, and the atmospheric density would be like under a couple hundred feet of water. And, oh yeah, the interstellar distances? Makes more sense to develop large settlements in free space here in the Solar System whose environments and gravities can be controlled and monitored.
#35 Don51
“what if the Chinese had found the Europeans and opened trade routes ”
Marco Polo went to China before that the Europeans went to America, but not by sea
Don51
Yet, in one of the big ‘ifs’ of history – what if the Chinese had found the Europeans and opened trade routes before the Europeans had found America? Would this world bear resemblance to what it is today?
Well, of course, the Chinese and Europeans had known of each other for a thousand years prior the Zheng He’s naval expeditions. More to the point is that the Chinese were on the verge of positioning themselves to open trade routes around the coast of Africa, predating the Portuguese by a few decades. Had they then proceeded in the other direction across the Pacific, they might have reached the New World from the Pacific side decades before Columbus.
As to the 1883 near-bombardment: What a great movie/TV series possibility that would be!
The Apocolypse fascinates because it is a way to deal with our own mortality. For each of us the universe will someday end and with it something will be lost. To keep busy with stockpiles and preparations or to preach about Global Warming is a way to try and buy more time.
Redemption, in the minds of most people consists in how you are seen by others. If you are judged “good” then the end of the universe is not to be feared. If I cover my car with enough of the right kind of bumper stickers then how could I not pass through the gates of heaven?
But each of us is really a universe. Like the one we see through the telescope there is more in our inner universe than anyone else will ever know. That will be gone someday.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. [laughs] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like [coughs] tears in rain. Time to die.”
replicant Roy Blatty
from the movie Blade Runner
Re 11. Not Uncle Joe
“Every other sci-fi universe had aliens, to my knowledge…”
Check out The Instrumentality of Mankind stories by “Cordwainer Smith” (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger). It is quite optimistic – he has mankind expand and fill the universe, but realistic – the government controls everything, tries to engineer people to be happy, and fails.
There are very few references to actual aliens, but the ones that are in there are truly bizarre. Like a planet of telepathic chickens that evolved from the regular earth chickens after their cargo ship was lost in a time warp. And giant turkeys that taste like turkey, a fact which saves the Earth from their invasion.
What happens when China colonizes Venus is well worth the short read: http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1416521461/1416521461___7.htm
#22 vanderleun
It is not often that I find myself disagreeing with you, but I will take issue with your definition of terms. Yes, we have been looking for about 40-50 years. But our search to date, especially in the past, has been with primitive means and from the bottom of our gravity well. The seeking of the unknown and a frontier is ingrained in our DNA. And our frontiers are gone on earth, not because there are not things to explore, but because the whole planet is governed, organized, and rationalized by various blocks of officialdom.
It is a vast field to search, vaster than we can imagine. Given the size and our limited means, it is not surprising that we do not have positive results.
As #28 Dworkin Barimen said,
We have a miniscule amount of data, and are just examining our first actual samples from outside that gravity well [the Mars probes and the Japanese Hayabusa asteroid probe]. The data is inconclusive, but not definitively negative. It may well be that it turns out to be negative as far as we can tell. But the search is worth the relatively minimal cost [we spend more on free birth control than we do for the search for extraterrestrial life]. It is a frontier, and in every frontier there are people who are monomaniacal to the point that it mimics faith and not tightly wrapped. It seems to be a generic requirement. In the event that progress and research are still a cultural/political possibility for the next century [at the rate we are going a dark age is not inconceivable]; it would not be a waste for us to follow that path. If science progresses, and research remains a possibility; I suspect that we will have enough data to then make a determination as to the relative worth of continuing. YMMV.
If our civilization falls, then the SETI expenditures will be meaningless either way. I will note that the search does carry a certain level of risk, on two levels. If we find life, but not intelligent life, there is the possibility that some disease will jump from it to us if our biologies are compatible. Most human plagues are crossovers from animal versions due to prolonged exposure as the animals were domesticated. If we find intelligent life, there is the disease possibility, plus if the intelligent life is equal or greater than we are; there is the risk of “culture shock” akin to what happened to aboriginal peoples on our planet.
Subotai Bahadur
Paper on the 1883 event at link. Note that 1883 was an interesting year with Krakatoa blasting away that year also. Cheers -
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1110/1110.2798.pdf
Hitler explains why 2012 is not the end of the world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRRCjux1sbg
Concerning other planets in the galaxy, the following chart is of interest:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/
Kepler is an interesting telescope/spacecraft. It discovers planets by detecting the planet as it transits across the star’s disk (like the recent transit of Venus across the Sun’s disk). A planet needs to transit at least three times before it is considered a valid measurement. This process imposes obvious limits, e.g. it takes at least three years to detect an Earth clone orbiting a Sun clone. Kepler began searching for planets on 12 May 2009. The discovery of Earth clones should have already begun but it hasn’t really happened. Why? Because Kepler assumed that the luminosity of most stars are similar to our Sun. This proved not to be true. The Sun is actually a “funny duck”. The Sun is a very quiet, well behaved star. Most stars tend to have lots of star spots (local equivalent of sun spots) and their luminosity is noisy. Distinguishing between a planet transit versus a bunch of star spots is difficult. This discovery may have consequences towards the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the Fermi Paradox (google it). It’s possible that only quiet, well behaved stars like the Sun are capable of supporting biology. This leads to the “Rare Earth Theory”, i.e. Earths with biology are extremely rare in the universe (Maineman @ 39 suggested this). It’s possible that an “Earth” is possible only if it is orbiting a well behaved star like the Sun, has a large moon like ours to cause plate tectonics and a distant orbiting gas giant like Jupiter that acts as a garbage man cleaning out comets and asteroids. This combination of requirements may make an Earth extremely rare, i.e. one planet out of a million. Our galaxy has billions of stars but may have only thousands of Earths that are typically separated by hundreds of light years. If the Laws of Physics requires that interstellar travel speed be less than 5% speed of light, then the time required to travel from one Earth-like world to another maybe greater than a civilization’s nominal life expectancy. This would explain Fermi’s Paradox. It would also mean that our galaxy is very boring.
Fletcher Christian @ 31 said:
“Similar speculations have been made about life in liquid ammonia (which isn’t as different from water chemistry) or even self-sustaining plasma vortices inside stars.”
I have a sneaking suspicion that **WE** are actually self-sustaining plasma vortices inside a star or some sort of organized information inside the lattice of a neutron star’s core. What we call “reality” is actually a complex computer game that was constructed because real life inside the neutron star was deadly dull. I’ll known whether this theory is true or not a few seconds after I have died. I’ll keep you posted.
Don Rodrigo @ 46 said:
“As to Obama and space programs: He’s not doing anything differently than any president in his position would do at this time, and he did sign on to COTS, the use of so-called “private sector” launch services meant to substantially decrease the cost of getting into space.”
Obama is no friend of the Space Program but Romney probably would have been worse. Obama has made these foxy proposals of doing stuff assuming that the funding ramps up after he leaves office. I’m sorry to say that one of my heros (Buzz Aldrin) was actually sucked in by this transparent nonsense. The Space Program is currently in the toilet waiting to be flushed away. The Fiscal Cliff maybe the excuse to pull the chain and send us down the drain.
Gordon @ 38, It has been suggested that Carl Sagan’s greatest scientific achievement was marrying Lynn Margulis. She was a brilliant scientist and provided Sagan with some of his initial credibility. She married Sagan when she was only 19 years old and clueless (Sagan was 4 years older). Their marriage lasted 8 years. I guess Margulis got tired of all the bullshit streaming out of Sagan and opted to be an honest scientist rather than a stage prop. Margulis was wife #1 for Sagan. He went through two other wives before he dropped dead at age 62. For those who have forgotten, one of Sagan’s big ideas was “nuclear winter”. Deep down in the worst parts of hell, Antonio Gramsci smiled after he heard about “nuclear winter”. “Nuclear winter” was the concept that set the stage for anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Arguably, belief in AGW was Sagan’s greatest legacy.
Does it really seem likely that in a universe of “fifty billion to two hundred billion galaxies and possibly much higher” with an exponentially higher number of planets…
That we are the only planet in all that expanse, to develop intelligent life?
And just think, all that real estate is empty…and without anyone ever being able to get to it, much less use it.
Right, got some oceanfront property right here to sell you.
It’s amazing what human beings are capable of convincing themselves of…
Then there’s the matter of what evidence is there that a space faring species will be friendly? Other than wishful thinking? What if they’re the alien equivalent of Muslims? You will worship RA!
And if we get really lucky and they are friendly, why should our interaction with a technologically superior civilization yield a different result than our history? You’ll recall that things haven’t gone well for the more primitive society…and that, that was the reason for Star Trek’s ‘prime directive’.
Careful what you wish for people, you might get it.
How the ‘Mayan Apocalypse’ came from a New Age magic mushroom trip:
“People who are expecting the world to end on December 21 – the so-called ‘Mayan
Apocalypse’ – should be in for a pleasant disappointment.
The ‘prophecy’ does not stem from the Mayans at all – or date from thousands of
years ago. Instead, the beliefs come from two New Age books in the Seventies and
Eighties. The two books predict outcomes as surreal as a ‘upgrade’ to human
consciousness predicted by a spirit from the seventh century. The date itself
comes from a prophecy based on a magic mushroom trip.”
See:
http://news.yahoo.com/mayan-apocalypse-2012–how-predictions-came-from-new-age-magic-mushroom-trip-130852054.html
#22
Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof.
That is a materialistic and limiting view of things. Most, probably nearly all things we “know” are faith based. 99.9999% of people taking calculus, for example, will never acquire any experiential evidence or proof of its validity. They will rely on the experience of others, which for practical purposes is more an act of faith than a proof. Double for subjects like history and medicine.
I suggest a more complete definition of faith as a reasonable belief in things that are beyond our experiences. The inclusion of reasonable in the definition keeps faith outside the boundary lines of pure delusion.
So long as one’s beliefs do not violate the law of non-contradiction then they cannot, ipso facto, be dismissed as irrational as the secular, materialistic world would like them to be.
In addition, your limiting definition of faith cuts people off at the knees from enjoying the experience of those things that are most pleasant about being human. Can anybody make a proof for love or honor? We know that honor and love exist because we can see how honorable and loving people act. Is that enough of a proof of the abstract? Then why not a God that created the universe, or the possibility of extraterrestrial life?
OT
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2012/12/al_nusrah_front_alli.php
Cheery news from Bill Roggio. ^^^^^^^^
It’s apropos ‘the following-from-behind ethos’ of the Pink House.
=========
In ordinary diplomacy the dominant patron-power would pressure its proxies to do the right thing.
However, the Wan has so alienated the Saudi royals that America’s influence with them has to be minimal.
If Barry has any influence with Qatr — that’d be news.
27 Eggplant
Just finished reading a book “Rough-hewn land” by Keith Mendahl, that explains the gold in California. It is the result of hot water dissolving metals from cooling magma over the past 200 million years in Nevada. A subducting plate under the western edge of North America produced giant plutons that as they cooled produced pockets of gold and other metals from hot water circulating around the cooling magma. Gold and other metals are concentrated in the last magma to cool, so if hot water circulates through that magma a high concentration of gold can result. The Sierras themselves also contained plutons, and also produced associated ores.
Some of the eruptions in Nevada were bigger than the Yellowstone blasts. One Caldera was 50 miles in diameter. We are lucky to be living in a quiet time.
Rivers that flowed from Nevada to the Pacific took gold and other metals and since gold is heavy, they were deposited in river gravels in what are now fossil rivers. Other newer rivers eroded Sierra gold deposits, and that gold is found in stream bottoms.
55
Regarding other intelligences. We do seem the product of a series of “lucky” coincidences. The sun just the right size. Too big, not enough time before it blows. Too small, too tiny a habitable zone. Jupiter just the right size and location. A lot of the hot Jupiters would have swept any rocky planets away in their movement toward their star.
The real improbable event is the creation of the moon. A hit with just the right tilt to produce the moon seems a jackpot win. Without the moon, the earth is less stable, and so life has a harder time.
Another requirement for intelligence is multi-cell creatures. We seem the product of our mitochondria living within cells that “ate” them. We may find lots of worlds with life, but it never left the bacteria stage.
The earth is over 4 billion years old, but it only was able to support oxygen breathing life the past billion. We only have another billion before the sun heats up as it ages and we have to leave our home planet or die. More lucky timing.
Remember earlier suns had less metals, they started with only hydrogen and helium, so we are the result of 10 billion years of supernovas building up the supply of other elements. Without the supernovas, we don’t exist. So we may be one of the first generation planets capable of supporting life.
Much of the galaxy is lethal to life. The radiation levels at the center of the galaxy make life impossible. It may be that only suns more than 20,000 light years from the center are far enough away to support life. Our suns stable orbit around the galaxy is also important. So those thousand planets may orbit suns that live where it is deadly to life.
We keep learning about how dangerous the universe is, gamma ray bursters were unknown just a few years ago. What else don’t we know that kills intelligence?
#58 and #22,
A POV, hopefully worth consideration.
Ah, but there is proof of God. That proof is personally available to anyone.
God’s one limitation is that he cannot, violate his own nature.
He gave us free will and, belief in him cannot be freely given, if we obtain proof before extending faith. First we believe and then we see. Not see and then believe.
The reason this is so is because “belief in him” is not a matter of simple faith in his existence. That gains one little. That is the answer of the deist, who says, OK I believe, now what, so what?
Rather, it is in acceptance of God’s will, i.e. to believe in him, to place one’s trust in him “as in the trust of a little child for a loving parent” wherein faith lies.
Tragically, Islam’s main tenet and meaning, ‘submission’ is nearly correct and entirely wrong. To attain salvation, to be free of our spiritual chains, we must freely submit to God’s will because his understanding, his ‘sight’ is unhindered, whereas ours, despite our very best intentions is, as through “a glass darkly”. The first area where Islam goes ‘off the tracks’ is in asserting that Allah is willing to force us to submit to his will.
That of course is completely contradictory to the entire message in both the Old and the New Testaments. Of course God wants mankind’s reconnection with him and desires the world to know and live in his presence. To live under his laws. But he will never do that through compulsion. That would violate his own gift, his own nature. Instead, he sends his ‘wayshowers’ to persuade us and lead us to the light.
People who cannot find it within themselves to believe in God are not really talking about his existence, per se. They are actually wrestling with their difficulty with believing in his goodness. Therein lies the spiritual crisis and therein lies their difficulty.
Invariably, their disbelief centers upon their own inner ‘bad child’ and the ‘wickedness’ they see in others. They then rationalize that spirit of disbelief with logic and reason; i.e. he can’t really exist (be good) because he allows so much pain and injustice in the world.
There are answers to that seeming conundrum; we live in a physical universe of cause and effect, step out in front of a moving car and you are going to get run over, no matter how morally good and/or innocent you may be. “Bad’ people who do evil to others are exercising, however unjustly, their free will. To stop them, God would have to deny their free will. Sorry, he won’t do that because he can’t do that, he can’t violate his own nature.
In the most profound of ways, God is as much a prisoner of his own nature, as we are of ours. God can only hold out his hand asking us to take it so that he may lead us back to our original nature, the one he created for us.
Blert @ 59,
If jihadists have really conquered a fully loaded chemical weapons dump in Syria then it needs to be bombed flat by B-52s immediately. This would be a no brainer for George W. Bush by I suspect the Pink House is racked with indecision.
presbypoet @ 60 said:
“Rivers that flowed from Nevada to the Pacific took gold and other metals and since gold is heavy, they were deposited in river gravels in what are now fossil rivers. Other newer rivers eroded Sierra gold deposits, and that gold is found in stream bottoms.”
It’s my understanding that California gold originated in superheated water under high pressure and then eroded out in ancient rivers that flowed north and south. Modern rivers in the Sierras tend to flow to the west crossing over these ancient river beds. Gold mineralization seems to require successive concentration processes.
presbypoet also said:
“Another requirement for intelligence is multi-cell creatures. We seem the product of our mitochondria living within cells that “ate” them.”
Earlier on, I mentioned Lynn Margulis. One of her great claims to fame was discovering that mitochondria were ancient bacteria having their own DNA. These ancient bacteria were permanently incorporated within our cells. She was also the co-inventer of the Gaia hypothesis with James Lovelock. A whacky idea of her’s was that some insects are actually two separate species combined in one organism, e.g. caterpillars and butterflies. It’s a crazy idea with a “ring of truth”. Margulis was a brilliant scientist. Too bad, she got mixed up with Sagan.
blert @32 John C. Wright’s “The Golden Age” trilogy is a great sci-fi space opera taking as its theme the complete human transformation of our solar system, yet keeping alive the dream to explore further. John C. Wright also runs a pretty good blog of his own, often linked by Vanderleun on his fine site: http://www.scifiwright.com/
32. blert
Humanity is never going to travel to the stars because we will be able to utterly transform our own Solar System so very much cheaper.
……………
Its only +500 years since columbus. We live in an age that would be unimaginable to Columbus.
After 500 years from now–at current rates– we will have utterly transformed the solar system. If the technological leap from now to 2500 is as great as it has been from 1500 to now then it will be long past time for the stars.
But I’m assuming that things like string theory are about like ether theory of the 19th century–ie a bridge to nowhere. And that the constant acceleration of computer speeds will end about the time that Kurziwell’s singularity comes to pass in +-2039.
As it its the star trek series is set mostly between about 2250 and 2290–which counting backward is only the period between the french and indian war and roughly the conclusion of the american revolution.
So there could be some seriously disruptive technology in the next 500 years that pushes forward the time in which people reach the stars.
That said, I think the way to the deserts of the moon and mars is through the deserts of the earth.ie the way to create the technology to make and scale settlement of the moon and mars possible is to first create the technology that turns the world’s deserts green.
I believe that’s what’s happening now.
Eggplant @ 55 – Nuclear winter died in the desert of Kuwait along with 640 oil well fires. My little contributon to that effort was the “venturi tube”. You can see it in action in Imax Fires of Kuwait Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whxPMsArp64 watch 5:04 to 7:40.
The part I like the best is when George Hill says, “You’ve got to be careful or it will suck your heart out.”
The key question you’ve got ask yourself is, “If not me, then who else?”
On the matter of California gold–that gold had a great deal to do with the expansion of American wealth in the second half of 19th century..(along with nevada silver and alaska gold.)
However, the history channel on tv has mentioned that the original wealth expansion for western europe stemmed from a mountain of silver in the andes that spanish mined in the 1500′s
…………
The main reason for its richness and high population was the discovery of silver in Mount Potosí overlooking the city. The common name for the mountain is “Mount of Riches” or “Cerro Rico” in Spanish. Estimates on the amount of pure silver mined in this location range from about 45,000 to 80,000 metric tons of pure silver, making it the largest silver mine area in the world.
Potosí was founded in 1546, as a mining city and was, throughout the Spanish colonization of Latin America, its richest conquest. It was part of the Perú Viceroy’s domain and was then known as part of “Alto Perú” or “High Perú.” The main, rich silver vein in the Mount was largely depleted by the beginning of the 19th century, and eventually became principally a tin mining area.
Read more: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/21st-century-pacifist/2011/aug/24/potosi-boliva-silver-mountain-led-riches-and-death/#ixzz2EhGeuKBI
………………
The importance of Spanish money in the [American]colonies cannot be overstated. It has been estimated that half of the coins in colonial America were Spanish reales. They were used not only as coinage but also treated as a commodity, as one would use silver or gold bars. In 1645 Virginia made the Spanish real the standard currency. In fact, the first coinage authorized by an English Royal patent for the colonies, the American Plantations token, minted at the Tower of London, stated its value on the obverse of the coin not in English currency but as 1/24th of a Spanish real.
http://www.coins.nd.edu/ColCoin/ColCoinIntros/Sp-Silver.intro.html
My apologies to Wretchard because I exceeded the 4 comment limit. I found this thread very interesting and could not resist.
Dworkin Barimen @ 28 said:
“Ablative ice shield strapped on to the front of the craft. That’s what Clarke suggested in The Songs of Distant Earth (I think that was the book). Yeah, that’s even more mass to push, but it’s more realistic than the Enterprise’s deflector dish.”
Enterprise’s deflector dish was mindless prattle (typical “Star Trek” nonsense). Coming up with a good erosion shield is the #2 problem with a starship design. The #1 problem is the propulsion system. James Cameron waved his hands at the erosion shield problem through the Venture Star spacecraft concept shown in the movie “Avatar”. The British Interplanetary Society addressed the problem with their Daedalus starship. Lawrence Livermore National Lab also examined the problem with a starship they proposed. Ice won’t work for a starship erosion shield. The vacuum is pretty hard in interstellar space (about 1 particle/cm^3). However even a vacuum that hard will still produce a significant shockwave if the vehicle is banging along at 5% speed-of-light. A shockwave means gas compression and heating. That means the erosion shield will always be hot. Years ago, I did a half-assed calculation and found the stagnation point temperature to be about 300 deg.C. An ice erosion shield would sublimate. I should add that tripping up on that sort of detail was typical of Arthur C. Clarke who was usually a brilliant SF writer. Another famous error of Clarke’s was the aerocapture maneuver in “2010″. Aerocapture is normally an excellent idea (you have to do it if you send people to Mars). However there is one planet in the Solar System where aerocapture does not work and that’s Jupiter. Jupiter’s gravity well is so deep that the delta-V required for the periapsis raising maneuver is greater than the delta-V saved in doing aerocapture in the first place.
Stephen b @ 32 mentioned John C. Wright. I’m currently rereading Jack Vance. Jack Vance is still alive but older than the hills (unfortunately, he’s too old and blind to continue writing). IMHO, Jack Vance is the world’s greatest living SF author.
[already too many comments, I'm done for this thread]
egg @ 62: the Pink House
I like that, I think I shall steal it, thanks!
e @ 67: , Jack Vance is the world’s greatest living SF author.
Brin? Swanwick? Gibson? Sterling? Niven?
“Unprecedented Maya Mural Found, Contradicts 2012 “Doomsday” Myth”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/05/120510-maya-2012-doomsday-calendar-end-of-world-science/?source=hp_dl1_news_maya20120510
There’s only one reason to go to an alien race at a different star and that’s if they’ve got beer.
60 “Much of the galaxy is lethal to life. The radiation levels at the center of the galaxy make life impossible.”
Reptoids are supposedly resilient against radiation. Ref. Doctor Who “Colony In Space” from 1971, or even “Frontier In Space” made shortly after. Both histories predate 1974′s “Land of the Lost”.
OT, Richard. Your intrepid posters frequently say things that are of enormous interest to me, but likely of not enough interest to the board at large to pursue en masse. Is there some way we could develop a “side board” or a “pasted” topic where folks could toss in the odd comment in response to ongoing threads of discussion from the Regulars? I’m thinking that when we lost Capt. Lefon at Neptunus Lex some good folks were able to develop a Facebook page to keep the community together. I haven’t made much use of that as Lex himself was the focus of my interest. But the model might be worth pursuing if enough of the BC Regulars had any interest. Thought I’d run it up the flagpole and see if anyone hoisted a glass…?
”That doesn’t even count the minor extinctions. Thus, from one point of view, the Apocalypse is not only coming, it’s been around the block a few times already. There is even some debate over whether such extinctions are periodic or follow some kind of distribution. Some scientists even think they can predict them. National Geographic reports ‘a new study [which] suggests that global warming could threaten one-fourth of the world’s plant and vertebrate animal species with extinction by 2050.’
You shouldn’t be out buying candles. You should be buying carbon credits.”
We can always count on our government to tax the end of the world. You’d think they’d be generous and do something harmless like printing more money.
”We have been to the moon we are not going back”
We’re not even going back to work, let alone to the moon.
GB@12: “There are also huge advantages to factory refining and fabrication on the moon.”
We’re not even allowed to build the Keystone pipe line, there is no chance for this.
sbw@13: “It seems to me that there is equally compelling evidence for no life anywhere else in the universe.
Where are they, anyway?”
I think of intelligent life as I do numbers, colors, senses or even elements; just one is sufficient to logically assume an infinite number. It seems to me that it would be the rare object that exists in but one form and one place.
”MP@65: The key question you’ve got ask yourself is, “If not me, then who else?””
Or to quote Dan Daily: “Come on you, sons-of-bitches, do you want to live forever?”
MSO @ 73 – I guess it runs in the family, we’re the point men of civilization.
Back in 1775 it was the Foster Rubicon, a few Americans against the Royal Navy and winning!
http://tinyurl.com/6n8afcw
They had a scientist on NPR who was attacking the Mayan theory, while arguing for global warming… These are folks who believe binding a human skull makes it grow bigger. Or that ancient progeria was as common as modern-day autism.
(There probably were attempts to make gods out of kids using Lamarckian methods, but they typically failed.)
Not Uncle Joe@11: “Every other sci-fi universe had aliens, to my knowledge…”
Not quite. Asimov didn’t have much in the way of aliens either, beyond some very boring, basic plant life and the like. Humans were the only intelligence, along with robots of course.
lescoulee (70),
OR babes (think of my namesake.)