Archive for category science
The New Elephant In The Room
Posted by Rational Dreamer in science on April 26th, 2010
How to turn the cute and adorable into the creepy and disturbing through the wonder of modern technology:
I guess that’s the price we pay for our steady diet of scifi thrillers…
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:
The Spookiness of Chance
Posted by Rational Dreamer in religion, science on April 11th, 2010
Sometimes life throws up the oddest of coincidences. Here’s one, for example…
I have lived at my present address here in Austin, Texas, for the last 13 years. On average, I take two or three trips a year which involve catching a flight out of Austin, making about 25 and 30 in total. In all that time I have only ever answered the front door bell on two occasions to find Jehovah’s Witnesses on my doorstep. And guess what? Both times were on days I was due to fly out of Austin.
That did mean I had a convenient excuse for closing the door on them, but what are the odds? Out of over 4800 days they could have called, they called on two of just 30 days when I was preparing to fly out of town.
It’s no surprise that people think that something spooky is going on when these little coincidences happen, or that some kind of higher power is controlling events in their lives. Just think of all the thousands of little events that are continually going on in any one person’s life—who they park next to at work, who they bump into at the supermarket, what they see when they turn a particular corner of a particular street, and so on—so it should be no surprise to anyone that seemingly strange coincidences occur.
Kepler Scooped! (sort of…)
Posted by Rational Dreamer in science on April 21st, 2009
Just a couple of days ago I posted on this blog saying that the Kepler space telescope may already have the first Earth-like planet to be discovered—one capable of supporting life—in its sights. Well, now a team of European astronomers has made me look at little foolish by announcing that they have confirmation of the very first Earth-like planet to be located within a star’s habitable zone, before Kepler’s mission is even fully underway.
The team announced the discovery of a new exoplanet (a planet outside our own solar system), Gliese 581e, which is the lightest exoplanet ever discovered at less than twice the mass of Earth, but it takes just 3.15 days to orbit its star, and even though the star (Gliese 581) is a relatively cool red dwarf star, it is way too close and hot to have a chance of supporting life.
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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