The Cosmos: Its Origin, History, and Future, Self Explained

Our Universe: Beginnings and Early History
The story of the cosmos, like every other story, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We may quibble over a detail here or there. But since none of us were here at the beginning, and none of us are likely to be here at the end, we must take our best guesses.

Our Universe Today and Tomorrow

While none of us expects to see more than a small part of the cosmos with our own eyes, we like to view panoramic visions which help us to place our lives and our knowledge in context.

Cosmic DestiniesAll things come to an end eventually -- if only to be transformed into something else.

It is easy to see our own stories, from our individual births through our lives, finally ending in our deaths, in this cosmic panorama. The analogy is not perfect, and many of us tend to resist the sense of a final end -- and perhaps of a distinct beginning. That is natural.

It is also natural for cosmologists to borrow from their own sense of biological life cycles when they create their theories of cosmic life cycles. What you see above is a graphical theory, the best that cosmologists can do as a group, at this time. Tune back in in 100 billion years for an update.

Power to the Galactic Empire!

How would an advanced galactic empire generate its power?

Some fraction of the radiation seething from the disk would be reflected and focused onto the power plants. Each power plant would transmit collected energy as a collimated microwave beam from a 100-mile diameter antenna. _Discovery

Discovery
A truly advanced civilisation on the Kardashev scale would harness the power of black holes to drive starships (PDF), power their industries, and gain control over both matter and time. We may have a few years to go before reaching that level.

A consortium of super-civilizations might pool resources to build a chain of power stations encircling the black hole. It would be the heart of a robust and fault-tolerant energy grid connecting numerous worlds like a fantasy scene out of the film "Tron."


However, I think it is more likely that a federation of expanding space colonies, spawned from a single mother civilization, would work together to maintain their viability. This wouldn't run into the thorny question of how two or more independent but similarly co-evolved species manage to contact each other and work out a practical energy infrastructure. _Discovery

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory believe that magnetic field lines extending a few million light years from galaxies into space may be the result of incredibly efficient energy-producing dynamos within black holes that are somewhat analogous to an electric motor....The energy in these huge magnetic fields is comparable to that released into space as light, X-rays and gamma rays. In other words, the black hole energy is being efficiently converted into magnetic fields.


Colgate and Los Alamos colleagues Vladimir Pariev and John Finn have developed a model to perhaps explain what is happening. They believe that the naturally magnetized accretion disk rotating around a black hole is punctured by clouds of stars in the vicinity of the black hole, like bullet holes in a flywheel. This, in turn, leads nonlinearly to a system similar to an electric generator that gives rise to a rotating, but invisible magnetic helix.
In this way, huge amounts of energy are carried out and away from the center of a galaxy as a set of twisted magnetic field lines that eventually appear via radio waves from luminous cloud formations on opposite sides of the galaxy. _SD

So you see, humans do not yet understand how black hole energy is converted into all the forms of energy that are propagated within and throughout the galaxy. But give us some time -- and a respite from all the energy starvationists hounding our steps -- and we just might take it to the next level.

Can't Fool Me! Happen to Know 'tis Turtles All the Way Down

io9
People typically want every story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even the story of the universe. We have invented a "big bang beginning", a mundane middle, and a deeply depressing deflationary vs. inflationary end. But famed physicist Roger Penrose is not content to leave it at that. Sir Roger says "it's turtles all the way down . . . ."

The Big Bang model holds that everything that now comprises the universe was once concentrated in a single point of near-infinite density. Before this singularity exploded and the universe began, there was absolutely nothing - indeed, it's not clear whether one can even use the term "before" in reference to a pre-Big-Bang cosmos, as time itself may not have existed yet. In the current model, the universe began with the Big Bang, underwent cosmic inflation for a fraction of a second, then settled into the much more gradual expansion that is still going on, and likely will end with the universe as an infinitely expanded, featureless cosmos.

Sir Roger Penrose, one of the most renowned physicists of the last fifty years, takes issue with this view. He points out that the universe was apparently born in a very low state of entropy, meaning a very high degree of order initially existed, and this is what made the complex matter we see all around us (and are composed of) possible in the first place. His objection is that the Big Bang model can't explain why such a low entropy state existed, and he believes he has a solution - that the universe is just one of many in a cyclical chain, with each Big Bang starting up a new universe in place of the one before. _io9_via_ImpactLab

Here is the abstract of the Gurzadyan / Penrose paper:

Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) posits the existence of an aeon preceding our Big Bang 'B', whose conformal infinity 'I' is identified, conformally, with 'B', now regarded as a spacelike 3-surface. Black-hole encounters, within bound galactic clusters in that previous aeon, would have the observable effect, in our CMB sky, of families of concentric circles over which the temperature variance is anomalously low, the centre of each such family representing the point of 'I' at which the cluster converges. These centres appear as fairly randomly distributed fixed points in our CMB sky. The analysis of Wilkinson Microwave Background Probe's (WMAP) cosmic microwave background 7-year maps does indeed reveal such concentric circles, of up to 6{\sigma} significance. This is confirmed when the same analysis is applied to BOOMERanG98 data, eliminating the possibility of an instrumental cause for the effects. These observational predictions of CCC would not be easily explained within standard inflationary cosmology _arxive

Well, there you have it. An eternal cyclic braid of universes all the way up and all the way back down. It is rather difficult to let go of this old universe -- the only one we know, after all. But if we have learned anything in the past century or so, it should have been that things are seldom as they seem. Beneath the surface, something is always lurking, ready to upset our best laid plans and theories.

Virtually everything you think you know, is wrong.

Why Is There Nothing Instead of Something?

While scanning the spectral emissions of the universe, astronomers must ask themselves that question. Why is there no evidence of anything beyond a raw, untamed cosmos? Earth's solar system is only 5 billion years old, whereas the universe appears to be 15 billion years old, give or take 5 billion. Where are all the old, wise civilisations of intelligent beings that evolved in other galaxies? The universe does, after all, have a long history that precedes us.

Centauri Dreams blog's Paul Gilster wonders the same thing.

We’re beginning to learn that planets are abundant around stars in our region of the disk, with the encouraging expectation that habitats for evolving lifeforms must be widespread. But maybe there are natural caps other than technological suicide that could end a civilization’s dreams.

You can’t help pondering this when you run into the recent news about a long duration gamma-ray burst (GRB) that took astronomers by surprise. GRBs are normally thought to flag the death of a massive star, but in this case the burst seems to come out of nowhere. What caused the event in a region of space where the nearest galaxy is 88,000 light years away? [ed: see photo above--the long tail of the Tadpole Galaxy. Some such tails--the result of galactic collisions--are too faint to see]

...Of course, where gamma-ray bursts are concerned, the farther away, the better. But there are other interesting sources of trouble besides GRBs. Consider 3C321....Both these galaxies, according to Chandra X-ray Observatory data, contain supermassive black holes, but the larger galaxy shows a jet that seems to be pointed right at the smaller. That could make things interesting indeed at the receiving end

Centauri Dreams

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are highly focused events of generally short duration--usually no more than a few seconds, but occasionally lasting minutes. If you are not directly in the path of a GRB in that time period, you are probably safe from its furious energies. But if you are in the path of the jet of an active galactic nucleus, as is the companion galaxy described above, you may be in for a long and deadly bombardment of lethal energy.

There is protection in numbers, even for star systems, however. The same way that the solar wind of our star protects us from extra-solar radiation, the "galactic wind" from the Milky Way Galaxy protects its member star systems from extra-galactic radiation. But there is a limit to its protection, and a sufficiently powerful extragalactic jet--or an intra-galactic jet within 500 light years of earth aimed in our direction--could mean lights out for our own very young civilisation. Some scientists believe that at least some of earth's large extinctions were triggered by the solar system's eccentric orbit out of the plane of the galactic disc every 62 million years.

While the universe is clearly a hostile place without the help of alien intelligences, we should consider that our dominant vision of wise, long-lived, peaceful elder races may be a bit uninformed--if not naive. We may be surrounded by evidence of scores of intelligent civilisations, and not know it--as in this online story by David Brin. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

So, although our noisy existence in this corner of an unexceptional galaxy would seem to have gone undetected by outsiders--so far--that may actually be a good thing, for all we know. It might simply be better for us, as a baby civilisation, to just watch and learn for a while. Explore our local neighborhood, send out robotic probes, extend our observational range as far out and back as we can. What we discover cannot help but surprise us.

At the same time, we should look into placing some of our eggs into other, well padded baskets.

Hat tip Advanced Nano.

Gamma Ray Bursts And Climate--I Hope You Like Cold Weather

Gamma Ray Bursts(GRBs) occur with frightening regularity across the cosmos. Space scientists consider GRBs important enough to warrant an orbiting satellite observatory, SWIFT, to monitor the sources of GRBs.

SWIFT is responsible for several important discoveries about GRB sources, including this recent news item:

GRBs release in seconds the same amount of energy our Sun will emit over its expected 10 billion-year lifetime. The staggering energy of a long-duration GRB (lasting more than a few seconds) comes from the core of a massive star collapsing to form a black hole or neutron star. In current theory, inrushing gas forms a disk around the central object. Magnetic fields channel some of that material into two jets moving at near-light speed. Collisions between shells of ejected material within the jet trigger the actual GRB.

Early in the mission, Swift’s X-ray Telescope (XRT) discovered that the initial pulse of gamma-rays, known as prompt emission, is often followed minutes to hours later by short-lived but powerful X-ray flares. The flares suggested — but did not prove — that GRB central engines remain active long after the prompt emission.After analyzing GRB 060714, named for its detection date of July 14, 2006, Hans Krimm of Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, Md. and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and eight colleagues, have demonstrated that X-ray flares are indeed a continuation of the prompt emission, showing that GRB central engines are active much longer than previously thought.

Source

Not so long ago, scientists began speculating that GRBs could have had a dramatic effect on Earth's history.

The idea that GRBs could have affected the course of evolution was first suggested two years ago (New Scientist print edition, 15 December 2001, p 10). John Scalo and Craig Wheeler of the University of Texas at Austin estimated that GRBs close enough to affect life in some way might occur once every five million years or so - around a thousand times since life began.

Now Melott believes he has palaeontological evidence that this actually happened at the end of the Ordovician period 443 million years ago, causing one of the five largest extinctions of the past 500 million years. Working with Bruce Lieberman, a specialist in fossil trilobites also at the University of Kansas, and other colleagues, he looked at the pattern of extinctions in the late Ordovician.

Source

Now all of that is no doubt interesting in the context of Earth's biological past, but what might it mean to modern-day humans?

There are two bad things that happen if you get enough gamma rays smacking into you:

"1) They dissociate ozone molecules. Bad. Worse, they also zap nitrogen molecules, which then go out and zap ozone molecules. Either way, a lot of ozone goes away. It depends on how close the supernova or gamma-ray burst is, of course, but some studies have shown that a gamma-ray burst ... could eradicate 30 percent of ozone globally, with some local places dropping by more than 50 percent. In technical terms, that would suck.

"2) Those nitrogen atoms go on and make NO2 molecules, which is a reddish brown toxic substance. Not enough would be made, most likely, to hurt folks, but it's dark and absorbs sunlight, so they can contribute to global cooling. The Ordovician event may have been from a nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst, as there is evidence of increased UVB [ultraviolet light B] hitting phytoplanktons and also cooling at the same time.

"There is a third thing: cosmic rays, atomic nuclei accelerated to relativistic speeds, may also be sent our way by supernovae or gamma-ray bursts. No one is really sure. But there is a lot of evidence (and this shocked me) that the cosmic rays affect our weather by seeding clouds (I am unclear how this works in detail but I'll know better as I read more). More clouds means more cooling, so more cosmic rays could trip an ice age. Seriously.

Source

A worldwide glacial epoch could easily be triggered by one of these events in our galactic neighborhood. There would be no warning to speak of.

We are lucky to have our warm, sunny days--long growing seasons for crops, plenty of time to soak up the gamma rays I mean sun's rays. For those who complain about a marginally warmer earth, may I suggest that you disconnect your air conditioners, and park your automobiles immediately. That would be most kind of you, for all of our sakes, and would partially excuse you for your lack of discrimination in your beliefs about the natural world. Thanks.

More on gamma ray bursts here, here, here and here.
Here are several abstracts of papers dealing with GRBs.

Hat tip Cocktail Party Physics

Build Your Own Cosmic Ray Detector for £40 And Be The First On Your Block to Announce the Coming Global Cooling

If cosmic rays do have the effect on climate that several authors claim, then it might be nice to monitor them more closely.

An 18 year old Scottish schoolgirl has built her own cosmic ray detector for £40, and has been named the world's brightest young physicist for her work.

Holly Batchelor, 18, a pupil at the Mary Erskine School in Edinburgh, made her own cosmic ray detector - out of a plastic fish tank, an aluminium sheet and some felt - to win the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair's (ISEF) First Award for physics and astronomy.

Her cloud chamber device, which makes the particle trails of the rays visible, cost less than £40 to make - far cheaper than commercially available machines - and she hopes this will enable schools to build their own versions, inspiring more young scientists.

Holly also studied the energy and angle of cosmic rays, which come from the Sun and supernovae explosions.

This has recently become a hot topic, because it is thought the rays have an effect on cloud formation and climate change.

Source

Of course, all of this is happening at the same time as the important CLOUD experiment at CERN1 is preparing for its first results.

The collaboration comprises an interdisciplinary team from 18 institutes and 9 countries in Europe, the United States and Russia. It brings together atmospheric physicists, solar physicists, and cosmic ray and particle physicists to address a key question in the understanding of clouds and climate change. "The experiment has attracted the leading aerosol, cloud and solar-terrestrial physicists from Europe; Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are especially strong in this area" says the CLOUD spokesperson, Jasper Kirkby of CERN. "CERN is a unique environment for this experiment. As well as our accelerators, we bring the specialist technologies, experimental techniques and experience in the integration of large, complex detectors that are required for CLOUD." An example in the present CLOUD prototype is the gas system, designed by CERN engineers, which produces ultra-pure air from the evaporation of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen. "It's probably the cleanest air anywhere in the world", says Kirkby.

The first results from the CLOUD prototype are expected by the summer of 2007.

Source

Al Gore in his docuganda "An Inconvenient Truth", conveniently neglected to mention the cosmic ray hypothesis. But then, that is the whole purpose of docugandas, no?

Anyway, the whole reason for mentioning the inexpensive cosmic ray detector, is that we are inexorably approaching a significant slowdown in the solar conveyor belt. According to the theories explained by these climate books, the slowing of the conveyor belt is a harbinger of drastically reduced solar magnetic activity. This reduction of solar activity leaves the solar system wide open to extra-solar cosmic rays, which could trigger much increased cloud formation in earth's atmosphere. The resulting global cooling could very well make most rational people nostalgic for "global warming."

And of course it is "clouds" that are the glaring weakness in the greenhouse gas theory of CAGW--catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, according to MIT's cloud expert Richard Lindzen. In fact, there are no General Circulation Models (GCMs) that give credible modeling results for the effects of clouds on climate.

The Solar Conveyor Belt, Sunspots, and Climate

NASA has found that the "solar conveyor belt", which is intimately connected with future sunspot cycles, has slowed significantly. This slowing points to a long and weak sunspot cycle, peaking in the early 2020s.

The Sun's Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. "It's off the bottom of the charts," he says. "This has important repercussions for future solar activity."

see captionThe Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the Sun. It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle, and that's why the slowdown is important.

...."Normally, the conveyor belt moves about 1 meter per second—walking pace," says Hathaway. "That's how it has been since the late 19th century." In recent years, however, the belt has decelerated to 0.75 m/s in the north and 0.35 m/s in the south. "We've never seen speeds so low."

According to theory and observation, the speed of the belt foretells the intensity of sunspot activity ~20 years in the future. A slow belt means lower solar activity; a fast belt means stronger activity. The reasons for this are explained in the Science@NASA story Solar Storm Warning.

"The slowdown we see now means that Solar Cycle 25, peaking around the year 2022, could be one of the weakest in centuries," says Hathaway.

Source

The relationship between cycle length and Earth temperatures is not well understood. Lower-than normal temperatures tend to occur in years when the sunspot cycle is longest, as confirmed by records of the annual duration of sea-ice around Iceland. The cycle will be longest again in the early 2020's.

Source

We know that the IPCC approach to climate is ludicrously myopic and inadequate. We know this because the metric most commonly referenced by IPCC reports--surface temperatures--is logically the wrong metric to use for measuring Terran heat content.

The IPCC SPM conclusion that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” is wrong as it ignores the lack of such warming in recent years by these other metrics of climate system heat changes. Their focus on the global average near surface temperature trends neglects to report that there are major issues with the robustness of this climate metric of global warming as reported in the papers cited in

Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res. in press,

many of which were available to the writers of the IPCC SPM but conveniently ignored. At the very least, the lack of recent tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling in the RSS data and the warming claimed for the near surface air temperatures conflicts with the multi-decadal global climate models in terms of how these temperatures are predicted to change.

Source

Hat tip Cuanas and M. Simon


One of my favorite bloggers recently asked for me to prove that human released CO2 is not responsible for "global warming." Such a demand is prima facie evidence of lack of training in causation and epistemology. Yet the blogger in question is undeniably talented, intelligent, and broad in outlook.

Of course, youth and inexperience may account for much of the inability of the public to sort through evidence and reasoning that deals with such issues as CAGW. But what about the masses of older people who are easily swayed by the media, and by special-interest science? What excuse do they have? Public school education? Post modernist scrambled brains?

Anyway, recent research suggests a link between solar magnetic activity and cosmic ray penetration into earth's atmosphere. Further, this research suggests that increased cosmic ray penetration leads to increased cloud cover, and decreasing solar heating effect.

A curious phenomenon, which I have been rather slow to take seriously--yet it certainly bears watching. Certainly if cosmic ray penetration can affect speciation and extinction of life forms on earth, it is not a great stretch to think they could also affect cloud formation and climate. We shall see.

Bigger than You Imagine? Bigger than You CAN Imagine!

The origin of life on Earth is a mystery shrouded in time. But the ebb and flow of life--the mass extinction events and rapid speciation periods over the eons--may very well be related to extraterrestrial forces.

Two years ago, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley found the marine fossil record shows that biodiversity—the number of different species alive on the planet—increases and decreases on a 62-million-year cycle. At least two of the Earth’s great mass extinctions—the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago—correspond with peaks of this cycle, which can’t be explained by evolutionary theory.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Kansas (KU) have come up with an out-of-this-world explanation. Their idea hinges upon the fact that, appearances aside, stars are not fixed in space. They move around, sometimes rushing headlong through galaxies, or approaching close enough to one another for brief cosmic trysts.

In particular, our Sun moves toward and away from the Milky Way’s center, and also up and down through the galactic plane. One complete up-and-down cycle takes 64 million years— suspiciously similar to Earth’s biodiversity cycle.

....Scientists know the Milky Way is being gravitationally pulled toward a massive cluster of galaxies, called the Virgo Cluster, located about 50 million light years away. Adrian Melott and his colleague Mikhail Medvedev, both KU researchers, speculate that as the Milky Way hurdles towards the Virgo Cluster, it generates a so-called bow shock in front of it that is similar to the shock wave created by a supersonic jet.

“Our solar system has a shock wave around it, and it produces a good quantity of the cosmic rays that hit the Earth. Why shouldn’t the galaxy have a shock wave, too?” Melott said.
The galactic bow shock is only present on the north side of the Milky Way’s galactic plane, because that is the side facing the Virgo Cluster as it moves through space, and it would cause superheated gas and cosmic rays to stream behind it, the researchers say. Normally, our galaxy’s magnetic field shields our solar system from this “galactic wind.” But every 64 million years, the solar system’s cyclical travels take it above the galactic plane.

“When we emerge out of the disk, we have less protection, so we become exposed to many more cosmic rays,” Melott told SPACE.com.

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It is politically correct in the media and on campus to say that only human activity can affect life on earth. It is a type of blindness to the universe that only good doctrinaire orthodoxies can manage.

Persons with more intelligent perspective maintain a broader outlook when seeking causes for important phenomena. Unfortunately, human beings do not typically live long enough to acquire the type of broad outlook that is required to solve large mysteries. Humans are congenitally small minded. That will not change until humans can acquire longer life, higher intelligence, and far better educational methods and tools.

In the meantime, those who can look farther--if only for short distances and periods of time--should enjoy the view.

Hip Hop Perspectives on the Universe, Regenerative Medicine, Nano Simulations

Some of you may wish to turn the volume down and select your own music for this "powers of ten" video.

Advanced Nano blog alerts us to progress being made in regenerative medicine.

The idea of growing an organ from one’s own cells or healing spinal cord injuries with cells transformed from embryonic stem cells used to be considered fodder for science fiction movies, but no more. Companies are not only developing technologies that can do exactly that, but these methods provide real potential to cure certain conditions and diseases.

According to “2020—A New Vision: A Future for Regenerative Medicine”, from the U.S. DHHS, regenerative medicine has the potential to exceed $500 billion within the next 20 years. Companies will be coming together to share their progress in this area at the “Termis North America Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Conference”, to be held in June.

Read more specifics at the source.

Michael Anissimov points to a blog full of nanotech simulations. These are the nuts and bolts of molecular nanotech machines. Go to the earliest sims in March, and work your way back to the present to better understand the progress being made by the blog author.

If you sit and wait for the mainstream media to tell you about the future, you will be much too late to profit from it, to any large degree. The future is being built behind the scenes in small steps. Small steps come together to make larger steps, and so on. But you will never know about these steps soon enough if you wait for the BBC, CBC, ABC, CNN, or Fox. Because by the time the "science journalists" tell you about it, everyone else will know already.


With all the information sources, free courses, tutorials etc. available on the internet, there is no excuse for any intelligent person not to have a reasonable understanding of basic science and technology. The problem is not really a lack of available knowledge. The problem is a lack of understanding of where to place the knowledge inside a larger knowledge framework.

Educational systems in the west are preoccupied with teaching students not to offend anyone. A basic understanding of the universe and how it works is considered unimportant next to politically correct sensitivities. Therefore it is up to you to teach yourself, and although the educational system receives hundreds of billions of tax dollars to use in teaching, you have no one to blame but yourself if you choose to rely on mainstream sources.

Now, the nanotech simulations at Machine Phase blog are fascinating, but I have the same reservations about them that I had when I first read Drexler's Nanosystems.
Why would someone believe that imitating macro-scale machines on the nano level is the best way to achieve nano-efficacy?

The many lessons yet to be learned from molecular biology may very well point to more efficient and efficacious ways of getting things done at the molecular level. So while the engineer in me thrills at the tiny gears, shafts, bearings, and other molecular machines designed into computer models, I am constantly thinking of alternative approaches to accomplishing the same thing.

Space News

Humans want to know if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. Although early hopes were pinned on Venus and Mars, those planets appear to be empty of intelligent life. So we are looking farther afield.

In the near future, with the launch of NASA’s Kepler Mission in 2008, we’ll have the tools to seek evidence of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of distant stars.

The search for life beyond Earth is the search for a good place to live, a habitable planet, in orbit about a long-lived star where life may arise and evolve. The first place we looked was at stars like our own Sun, a middle-sized, middle-aged star. G-Stars like the Sun are stable for about 10 billion years, which is a good long time for planets to form, and life to evolve

Source

Future space telescopes may be able to detect an Earth twin. Astronomers have already found evidence of water on an extrasolar planet.

Japan is planning an expansive series of space missions. China and Russia both consider space development vital to their strategic interests.

Space missions to study earth systems are becoming more important, with questions about nuclear proliferation and climate change--among others--being susceptible to observation from space. A planned April 25th launch on a Pegasus rocket aims to send a satellite to observe high atmospheric clouds. AIM--aeronomy of ice in the mesosphere--plans to look at mysterious mesospheric clouds that may be related to earth's climate.

Many space enthusiasts are pinning their hopes on Space Tourism, to stimulate the movement of humans into space. Many wealthy individuals have visited the ISS aboard Russian launch vehicles, and Bill Gates may do the same. Of course, Paul Allen has invested in Burt Rutan's launch company, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com is backing his own launch company in west Texas. Several other billionaires are also involved in space enterprises.

Earth governments cannot afford to pay for all the entitlements owed to future generations, much less subsidize human settlements in space. If that is ever to occur, private investment will lead the way, looking to make a profit.

It's Alive!!! Panspermia and the Possibility of a Living Universe

The theory of "panspermia" rests upon the ability of micro-organisms to survive a fiery passage through earth's atmosphere, and arrive on earth with the ability to reproduce.

....assuming that there are microbes on other planets, Mars for example, would they be able to withstand the pressure that arises when a meteorite crashes into their planet and catapults their rocky UFO into space – a pressure that is 400,000 times higher than that of the Earth’s atmosphere?

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, Ernst-Mach-Institut, EMI have systematically investigated this question for the first time: “We simulate the shock wave that occurs when a meteorite crashes into Mars,” says Dr. Ulrich Hornemann, who is in charge of the experiments at the EMI. “To do that, we detonate an explosive cylinder that accelerates a metal plate. This metal plate then hits a steel canister containing two thin stone plates between which there is a thin layer of microbes.”

When the metal plate crashes into the container, a shock wave is generated that passes through the stone plates and the layer of microbes. The astonishing thing is that even at 400,000 times atmospheric pressure, one ten thousandth of the microbes survive the impact of the metal plate; the main reason for this being that the inhospitably high pressure only lasts for a fraction of a second just like the impact of a meteorite.

Because the rocks that are broken off by meteorites usually have small cracks and crevices in them, the experts have also investigated the feasibility of porous rocks as ‘UFOs’. The result: Microorganisms can also survive here. And the small fissures are also advantageous to the tiny organisms in other ways, providing them with protection on their journey through space against UV radiation, solar wind and the icy cold and thus increasing their chances of survival, as the EMI’s project partners at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) found out. “It is therefore possible,” says Hornemann, “that life on Earth came here from other planets.”

Source

Check out more on Panspermia at Wikipedia. Even more at this SciAm article.


It should go without saying that humans have the capability to intentionally seed the universe with life. One way of doing that would be to send out robotic probes and nano-devices to prepare the habitats and life support (energy, air, food, recycling, etc.) for the humans to arrive later. This could be done on moons, planets, asteroids, and cold comets outside the strongest solar wind.

Another, more mischievous and less responsible way to seed the local universe with life, would be to send out engineered microbes. The microbes would initially take the form of inert spores, but would spring into active reproductive mode upon exposure to conditions favorable to life.

Can humans program microbes to recapitulate much of terran evolution? Not now, certainly, but in a few decades? If so, is there anything to be gained by "seeding" the universe in this fashion?

This Video Is Always Good for Some Perspective

There are some nice "Powers of Ten" websites where you zoom in or out very rapidly, to gain a perspective of the universe of very large and very small objects.

This short video does something similar. Some people use it to meditate on the significance (or lack of significance) of everyday worries within the greater cosmos.

Einstein's Gravity Equation Solved: Next Stop Alpha Centauri?

Hat tip to Efficient Academic blog, for pointing out this physorg.com article about a revolutionary new mathematical solution to Einstein's gravitational field equation. Dr. Franklin Felber is a noted physicist who announced an exact solution to Enstein's 90 year old equation yesterday in Albuquerque.

Felber's antigravity discovery solves the two greatest engineering challenges to space travel near the speed of light: identifying an energy source capable of producing the acceleration; and limiting stresses on humans and equipment during rapid acceleration.

"Dr. Felber's research will revolutionize space flight mechanics by offering an entirely new way to send spacecraft into flight," said Dr. Eric Davis, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin and STAIF peer reviewer of Felber's work. "His rigorously tested and truly unique thinking has taken us a huge step forward in making near-speed-of-light space travel safe, possible, and much less costly."

....Felber's calculations show how to use the repulsion of a body speeding through space to provide the enormous energy needed to accelerate massive payloads quickly with negligible stress. The new solution of Einstein's field equation shows that the payload would 'fall weightlessly' in an antigravity beam even as it was accelerated close to the speed of light.

Accelerating a 1-ton payload to 90 percent of the speed of light requires an energy of at least 30 billion tons of TNT. In the 'antigravity beam' of a speeding star, a payload would draw its energy from the antigravity force of the much more massive star. In effect, the payload would be hitching a ride on a star.

"Based on this research, I expect a mission to accelerate a massive payload to a 'good fraction of light speed' will be launched before the end of this century," said Dr. Felber. "These antigravity solutions of Einstein's theory can change our view of our ability to travel to the far reaches of our universe."

More immediately, Felber's new solution can be used to test Einstein's theory of gravity at low cost in a storage-ring laboratory facility by detecting antigravity in the unexplored regime of near-speed-of-light velocities.

This solution will require verification and experimental testing. Nevertheless it is an exciting development. Space travel to the stars is an old dream that is coming closer to reality, thanks to scientists and mathematicians like Dr. Felber.

2nd Star To the Right then Straight on 'til Morning

Where would you go if you could go anywhere? Micah at Event Horizon Blog, pointed to this suite of NASA sites discussing space travel options.

A recent article in the Scotsman newspaper looks at another idea, "AN EXTRAORDINARY "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.

The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine.

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. " Hat tip to we make money not art.com.

A slightly older article from livescience.com discusses the z-machine as of a year ago.

Burkhard Heim proposed this general concept back in the 1950s. Some friends and I in graduate school developed a mathematical model on paper for this type of drive, but decided it would have to wait for a fusion power source. Reportedly, the Z pinch has achieved some limited fusion reactions when deuterium was added to the experimental apparatus.

Update 6 Jan 06: Here is a link to the New Scientist article that goes into a bit more detail than the Scotsman account.