Archive for category astronomy
Stephen Hawking Warns Against Making Alien Contact
Posted by Rational Dreamer in astronomy, science on April 25th, 2010
Stephen Hawking may be one of the greatest theoretical physicists in history, but I’m not terribly impressed by his recent warning about making contact with aliens:
In a series for the Discovery Channel the renowned astrophysicist said it was “perfectly rational” to assume intelligent life exists elsewhere. But he warned that aliens might simply raid Earth for resources, then move on.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said.
I certainly agree that any extra-terrestrial aliens visiting Earth within the next thousand years or more would almost certainly be light-years ahead of us in terms of technology. And rather than being like Native Americans in relation to Columbus, we could be like ants to are in relation to human beings. Given that the Sun was born more than eight billion years after the Big Bang, there has been more than enough time for alien civilizations to be millions, or even billions of years ahead of us in technological prowess.
Thus Hawking’s concerns that aliens might want to raid Earth for its resources would appear to be misplaced. What does Earth have that isn’t available in abundance elsewhere? Not water, not minerals, not energy sources—they can be all found throughout the Solar System. So there’s really no need to trash our planet to get at stuff that’s freely available in places like the asteroid belt, Mars, or Jupiter and Saturn and their moons.
Fabulous Chaos
Posted by Rational Dreamer in astronomy, science on April 24th, 2010
Hubble celebrates its 20th year in space this week, and to commemorate the occasion NASA has published one of the finest Hubble photographs yet:
And not to be outdone by the heavenly chaos in the Carina Nebula above, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano has been serving up a treat here below:
Clicking on the photos will take you to the original sites and plenty more wonderful full-sized chaotic images to choose from.
Buzz Aldrin’s Monolith Madness
Posted by Rational Dreamer in astronomy, science on April 20th, 2010
I was poking around the underbelly of the Intertubes yesterday when I came across some entertaining astronomy nonsense that I somehow managed to miss last year—excited twittering (of the original kind) from the UFO community about former astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s appearance on C-SPAN last May when he talked about the existence of a monolith on a Martian moon:
Stellar Numbers for an Eclipse
Posted by Rational Dreamer in astronomy on April 7th, 2010
Last night, 824 Anastasia, an asteroid the size of the tiny Caribbean island of Barbados, passed directly between Earth and the star, Zeta Ophiuchi, briefly eclipsing the light of the star if you were watching it from within a narrow 25 mile path that cut across the western United States and Canada.
There are hundreds of thousands of asteroids and billions of stars, so it’s not all that uncommon for an asteroid to cross in front of a star, but this particular occultation drew more interest because Zeta Ophiuchi is easily visible to the naked eye. So, if you happened to be in the right place at the right time, you would have actually seen a bright star winking out for a few seconds for no apparent reason, which is very rare event indeed.
God Speed, Hubble Space Telescope
Posted by Rational Dreamer in astronomy on May 20th, 2009
The Hubble Space Telescope was released back into the wild this morning, it’s 19 year check-up, repairs and upgrade successfully completed, and spectacularly so. The only “failure” was the incomplete repair of the lesser-used half of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which they only half-expected to work anyway.
Here’s to many more years of spectacular images and even more spectacular scientific results. At one of the post-spacewalk press conferences, one of the scientists on the panel explained that Hubble now sends down 30 times more data than it did just after it launched, which is just one measure of how much more efficient and effective an instrument the newly, upgraded telescope has become. Long after its final plunge into the Pacific Ocean (hopefully many years hence), the scientific data obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope will continue to yield results that will bring us to a greater understanding of the universe around us.
First Light!
Posted by Rational Dreamer in astronomy, science on April 20th, 2009
This is a very cool image. In fact, it’s hard to describe in mere words how cool this picture really is. What you’re looking at is the first image beamed down from the Kepler space telescope, launched into orbit around the Sun (trailing Earth’s orbit) just over a month ago. You can just imagine standing on the bridge of some futuristic spaceship and looking out onto such a scene as this. But the really cool thing about this image is that in all probability, the first ever Earth-like planet we discover outside our own Solar System is somewhere within this picture.
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