Doug sticks to his guns: aliens don’t exist!
My last post ended with this paragraph:
“Sooner or later the world always gets a war though. This, this is why the aliens haven’t contacted us yet. Well, and the fact that they don’t exist. Details.”
An esteemed reader commented:
“Again, I will point out this isn’t accurate. I agree with you that aliens are NOT visiting earth in flying saucers, but to say “they don’t exist” is to VERY much overstate the case. We don’t know, one way or the other, and we don’t have enough info to even REALLY assess the likelihood that they exist in a scientific way.
BUT, and this is the key … given that earth supports life, and is one planet orbiting a relatively non-special star in a non-special galaxy, what are the odds that in all the trillions and trillions of stars out there, our sun is the ONLY one to have developed a planet with life around it? Strikes me, that would make us amazingly, unbelievably unique in the universe, and that sort o claim MUST have some backing to it.
Sagan said it best IMO. “If we are alone in the universe, what a tremendous waste of space.” Aliens aren’t visiting us in flying saucers, but I really don’t think it’s appropriate to say NO aliens exist. Given what we know today, if we ARE the only life in the universe, then we occupy a special position that needs to be explained. Until someone shows why earth is the only planet among TRILLIONS of stars to develop life, the logical assumption SHOULD be that life occurs anywhere that conditions allow it.”
OK, for starters I’m not saying that it’s impossible for a a language using, tool using, intelligent alien race to exist somewhere else in the Universe, in fact it’s entirely possible that a UFO will land on the White House lawn tomorrow. In the same sense that it’s possible for a chimp at a typewriter to randomly type Hamlet. And with the size of the Universe, and you put a chimp on every planet, it’s practically guaranteed, right? Well, no, it’s not, but I’ll get back to the chimps in a second. What I arguing is that “There’s no such thing as aliens” is the logical equivalent of saying “There’s no such thing as Santa Claus.” And please note that I am not talking about life, I think the Universe is permeated with life, I’m talking about other civilization-creating beings that would get most of our jokes, understand the concept of taxes, and probably blow each other up for equally inane reasons as we do. Yes, our brothers among the stars.
Well, first, let’s look at the evidence. (I have a theory that evidence is a good place to start.) And here we have a problem. The evidence for aliens is exactly the same as the evidence for ghosts, angels, fairies, God, Sherlock Holmes, Superman, etc. IE there may be people out there convinced they have met any and all of the above, and a whole host of imaginary beings that humans have conjured up throughout history, but none of them passes the first bar when looked at scientifically, because there’s nothing to look at. In fact the ubiquity of fictional beings throughout human history and across human culture argues pretty strongly that these fantasies fulfil powerful human needs. And whatever need they fulfil, no matter how much or how many people believe in them, from God to Santa Claus to aliens, there is no empirical evidence that they exist. In fact sociologists and historians have already noted how quickly belief in aliens is morphing into religion, there were UFO cults in the fifties for God’s sake. For all practical purposes, aliens are demonstrably no more real than Santa Claus.
So I think I’m pretty safe in putting aliens in the category of myth, since at the current time, that’s all the only category they fit in. Now what about arguments that with all that space out there, there have to be aliens? I mean, there’s 30 billion trillion (3×10²²) stars in the observable Universe, surely the odds say there have to be aliens? Well, let’s look at some long odds. Going back to our monkeys, what are the odds that a monkey will type Hamlet by typing at random? The probability is one in 3.4 × 10183,946 that the monkey will type Hamlet on his first try. Note that this number dwarfs the number of stars in the Universe, so it doesn’t help to have a monkey on each planet typing away. In fact, if the entire Universe were converted into typing monkeys, the odds of them typing Hamlet in the expected lifetime of the Universe are still less than less than one in 10183,800.
My point here is that there’s no reason to believe that humans are anything other than a really unlikely fluke. Life in fact seems to evolve into virtually infinite variability, it’s only our narcissism and conceit that we think it’s “natural” it evolve into something like us. Let me repeat that, just on Earth there are near infinite possibilities for life to evolve into, and no matter how many stars there are, they don’t approach infinity. Or another example, no two snowflakes are alike (well, maybe a few are,) but snowflakes seem to have an almost infinite number of very organized shapes they can form in. Well, snowflakes are simple compared to the evolution of DNA, there’s every reason the believe that life may exist in near infinite variety … with creatures like us just being one of endless possibilities. In fact I make the argument that the mere existence of us means that arguing there are going to be be others like us is like arguing that the monkeys are going to type Hamlet twice!
In any event, no disrespect is meant to Mr Bateman or anyone else who believes in the possibility of aliens. I also believe in the possibility of aliens, I’m just saying it’s the people who claim aliens are likely to exist are the ones making the unsupported claim. As another person put it, the chance of there being aliens in space is the same as the chance we will find a MacDonald’s® on Mars. Well, there’s basically no chance of that, right? My point here is that aliens are just as much a creation of the (limited) human imagination as Macdonald’s … so expecting to find them out there in the stars is about as likely.
I don’t know what we will find when we start to explore the stars, but I’m willing to bet that whatever it is … it won’t be what we expected in any way, shape, or form.
“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
Sir Arthur Eddington, English astronomer (1882 – 1944)
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit, it is central to illustrating the post, and it’s use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. I’m a little unclear on who holds the copyright, but I got it from this fine Slovak web site, here is the picture’s caption translated into English: “UFOs may collide with Santa Klaus only at a single location. The PF channel Sci-Fi TV by agency BETC euroRSCG.” Yes, there really is an infinite monkey theorem. And coming soon, my idea for SETI, since I seem to be lost in space these days.)
Answers to the Space Exploration Quiz
Well, unfortunately real life got in the way of my writing, but I’m back. First order of business, the overdue answers to the Space Exploration Quiz. It apparently didn’t stump people too long, since the correct answers were posted in the first few comments. C’est la vie. Still, for the record, these images are each the first image sent back by the first lander on their respective planetary bodies: The Moon, Venus, Mars, and Titan.
The top image was taken on the Moon by the Russian Luna 9 lander on 3 February 1966:
This achievement was the very first time images had been sent back from the surface of another planetary body. While the USA would beat Russia to the Moon some three years later, this was another first for the Russian Space Program. As a curious note, for some reason the Soviets decided not to release the images that Luna 9 sent back. However, British astronomers who had recorded the craft’s transmissions from the Moon realized that the file format (so to speak) the Russians had used was a standard format used by newspapers to transmit images. So they decoded the images and they were published in papers world wide despite the Russian’s unwillingness to share them. It’s even been speculated that someone in the Russian Space Program did this deliberately hoping the images would be intercepted and published.
Next we come to another Russian first in space, the Venera 9 lander:
The Venera 9 mission was the first mission to put a probe in orbit around another planet, and the first mission to return photographs from the surface of another planet. On 20 October 1975 the lander set down, only operating for 53 minutes, but it was long enough to do the job. Pretty impressive really, considering the incredible pressure and heat on the surface, 90 times the Earth’s air pressure and 450 °C (842 °F.) .
The third image is the first American entry, the first picture sent back from Mars by the Viking 1 lander on July 20 1976. This was the USA’s first attempt to put a lander on another planet, and it was a successful mission:
That’s Carl Sagan in the picture, a much younger Carl Sagan, and a model of the Viking landers. The Viking missions were the first missions specifically designed to look for life. And to this day, scientists are arguing about just what the results indicated, though most think they indicated weird soil chemistry but no life. As a historical note, the original plan had been to land Viking 1 on July 4 1976, as part of the nation’s bicentennial celebration. Unfortunately the originally chosen landing site was too rocky, so another had to be substituted. These two Viking landers were the landers I mentioned in a previous post, if they had just dug a few inches deeper they most likely would have found ice, and changed the course of space exploration.
Lastly, and in some ways, my favourite, the Huygens lander on Titan:
Titan is a moon of Saturn, so this landing took place considerably further from Earth than the previous images. Nearly three decades later too, aside from the Moon and Mars, there aren’t any other obvious or easy locations to send a lander. And Huygens didn’t have an easy time of it either, in the extreme cold the lander only functioned for 90 minutes. Still, that’s longer than mission scientists had hoped. Huygens sent back its images on January 14 2005. The “rocks” (probably ice) are only a few inches wide.
And there is an enduring mystery about Huygens. While other evidence seems to strongly indicated that Titan has lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons, there is a complication to that idea. The latest calculations seem to show that Huygens landed right in the middle of one of these lakes. Let’s review, here is the image sent back by Huygens:
Does it look like the lander is floating on a lake? While there is evidence of some liquid flow on the surface around some of the “rocks,” this clearly isn’t the surface of a body of fluid. The debate will continue no doubt, there’s more room for debate in science than most people realize.
Coming soon, the most comprehensive map ever made, “There are no adults,” 2012, God and tiny pebbles, and the usual ramblings about current events and politics.
(The above images are all public domain under US copyright law. Well, I’m not sure about the images sent by the Russian landers, but I think it can safely be claimed that these are historical images if there ever was such a thing. Coming soon, I think I’ll do a post on exotic space exploration proposals. I think that will be fun.)
Space Exploration Quiz!
Today, something a little different. This is a set of historic photos, space exploration geeks might recognize some or all of them off the top of their heads. These four pictures share a trait that no other pictures have, IE this set of four pictures is currently unique, there’s no other pictures that are in the same category. Can you guess what it is? I’ll post the answer by and by and discuss them more at length. And no looking at the names of the images to get clues! That would be cheating!
If you really know your space exploration you should also be able to say where, when, and by who each picture was taken. The only clue is that they are in chronological order. Have fun!
(The above images are all claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. They are not being used for profit, they are the only pictures available to illustrate the topic of the post, and they are arguably historically important images. And yes, it is a slow day on Doug’s Darkworld and I was desperate to publish something, anything! )
WORLD PANICS AS MYSTERIOUS GREEN BLOB SPOTTED IN DEEP SPACE, PRESIDENT OBAMA URGES CALM IN ADDRESS TO UN
There it is, a mysterious green blob in deep space. I wasn’t kidding. OK, maybe I exaggerated a little bit. What is it? No one knows. Is it a danger to Earth? Probably not, it’s about 700 million light years away. Normally when one tosses off huge astronomical distances, they get qualified by “that’s actually pretty close in cosmic terms.” In this case, no, 700 million light years is actually a pretty fair distance away. The nearest galaxy to Earth is some 2.5 million light years away, this puppy is nearly 300 times as far away as that. At the time the light from this image started on its way to Earth, there was only the most primitive life in the sea, small worms and such, and nothing more than microbes on land. And all the continents were pretty much gathered together in one big lump.
The mystery green object is called Hanny’s Voorwerp. It was discovered by Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007. How the heck did a school teacher discover an object 700 million light years away? I mean, this is a picture taken by a 2.5 metre telescope, it’s not something one can see with even the finest backyard telescope. Well, she was an amateur volunteer in the Galaxy Zoo project. What is the Galaxy Zoo project? It’s pretty simple really, this 2.5metre telescope was used to photograph much of the sky in something called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Literally millions of galaxies were photographed, far beyond what the world’s astronomers could examine. So millions of human volunteers were enlisted to download pictures from the sky survey and pore over them to identify the galaxies and other oddities. Yes, turns out the human brain is still pretty damn useful, especially when millions of them are harnessed. The project was big success, it determined some new information about the universe, and even led to the discovery of a new class of galaxy. And lastly, to the discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp.
So what the hell is Hanny’s Voorwerp? (Voorwerp is Dutch for object by the way.) No one knows for sure. It’s the same distance away as the otherwise unremarkable spiral galaxy IC 2497 next to it. It does seem clear that it is something called a reflection nebula. A reflection nebula is where interstellar gas, in this case possibly a deformed dwarf galaxy, reflects the light of some nearby object rather than generates the light itself. The other type of nebula is an emission nebula, where the gas itself has been so heated up that it is emitting light. A gallery of reflection nebula can be seen here. I haven’t been able to track down exactly how astronomers are able to determine one from the other, I assume it has to do with the exact nature of the light coming from the nebula.
OK, so its a bunch of gas reflecting the light from some green light source? What’s so weird about that? Well, two things. For one thing, it’s green. Reflection nebula are either red or blue, no one has ever seen a green one before. So there is either something highly unusual about the nebula itself, or something odd about the source of the light that is being reflected. And that brings us to the second thing odd about this, notice any brilliant green light near Hanny’s Voorwerp? The only thing bright enough to light up something that size would be a quasar, a huge black hole at the centre of galaxies. Well, galaxy IC 2497 doesn’t appear to have a quasar at its centre.
Are there any theories at all? Well, sort of. It’s possible that there was a quasar at the centre of galaxy IC 2497, but that for whatever reason it stopped emitting light some thousands of years ago, but the light it previously emitted is still hitting Hanny’s Voorwerp. It’s kind of a stretch, but it at least is possible. The colour though, that’s harder to explain. What scientific speculation along those lines I can find is beyond my ken, here’s a site that covers it but it’s pretty much Greek to me. And while most of the pics on the site show Hanny’s Voorwerp in blue, never fear, near the bottom they explain that in visible light, it would indeed appear green. The only thing that can be said for certain is that Hanny’s Voorwerp is very unusual, and it is continuing to get a lot of study.
No big lesson here, other that my oft repeated axiom that the Universe will always hold surprises for us. British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington (18882-1944) put it best when he said “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
(The above image is licensed by the Galaxy Zoo under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Credit and copyright: Galaxy Zoo. Coming soon, as a gentle reader reminded me, how scientists are going to weigh tiny pebbles to search for God. And yes, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but in this case, the reality is even stranger than the exaggeration.)
How a few inches of soil and some leaking cannisters set back space exploration by nearly three decades
Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit for the sake of a good story, it’s an old family tradition. My dad does it, my granddad was one of the best, so I’m in good company. And this is an interesting story, and a wonderful illustration of how even scientists can get trapped by their own assumptions. As I recently mentioned, there have been two recent amazing discoveries in the Solar System. It turns out, to coin a phrase, “there’s water in them there hills.” Yes, despite all indications to the contrary it appears that water is far more abundant on the Moon and Mars than scientists previously thought.
Scientists for awhile have known there was water on Mars in the past, and the recent rovers have shown there was lots of water on Mars in the past. How much water remained though was a bit of a mystery. There is some at the poles, and some indications there might be more elsewhere. Then the recent Mars Polar Lander scraped down into the dirt, and hit water. OK, they hit ice, to be more precise. The clincher though was images like the one above. Mars is frequently hit by meteorites since it has little atmosphere for them to burn up in. And our latest generation of Mars orbiters has been able to spot a number of small recently formed craters. And in many cases, scientists saw something like the above. Right after the impact there would be a lot of ice blasted from the crater, and over the following weeks it would disappear as it sublimated, that is to say it turned into water vapour without going through a liquid phase. And from the amount of ice scattered around these new craters, there must be a lot of water on Mars, all frozen just under the surface in the northern and southern latitudes.
Even more exciting and unexpected was the discovery of water on the Moon. It was so unexpected that scientists waited until three different probes had confirmed it, but the evidence was unmistakable, water was clearly present in surface soil on the Moon, especially in the polar regions. In fact it was being created or transported somehow, since the surface was “wettest” in the Moon’s morning but had dried out by the end of the Moon’s day. Now of course I’m not talking about liquid water, I am talking water bound up in minerals in the Moon’s soil. Tiny tiny amounts, but still, water is water. This makes the Moon a lot more attractive as a way station or a location for scientific bases, since water is not only indispensable for drinking, it can be converted into Oxygen and Hydrogen, the former for breathing, and both for use as rocket fuel. Having your own air, water, and rocket fuel available makes the Moon (and Mars) vastly more habitable since you don’t have to haul the same from Earth at fabulous expense. In fact the fuel for the return trips from Mars will likely be manufactured right on Mars by robots before the first astronauts arrive, since not having to haul rocket fuel to Mars for the return trip will mean vastly larger expeditions can be mounted.
However, I digress. There is another thing about these discoveries that is also fascinating, it turns out both of them could have been discovered in the 1970s. In the case of the Moon, astronauts brought back a lot of Moon rock and soil, why didn’t scientists detect the trace amounts of water in it? Well, turns out they did. However, the canisters the Moon soil and rock samples were returned to Earth in weren’t as air tight as had been planned. So when scientists detected trace amounts of water, they assumed it had to be contamination from air that had seeped into the storage cannisters. I mean, they knew there was no way that there could be water on the Moon, so what else could it be?
On Mars the situation is even more tragicomic. In the 1970s the Viking landers set down on Mars to look for life or at least the building blocks of life in the Martian soil. However, the soil samples they dug up didn’t appear to indicate any sign of life. And the pictures coming back from orbit sure seemed to indicate that Mars was very dry and had been so for a long time. However, as the recent meteorite strikes and the Mars polar lander have shown us, if the Viking landers had been able to dig just a few inches deeper, they would almost certainly have hit ice. And to put it mildly, scientists would have been thrilled and amazed. Instead, in the case of Mars, scientists just had bad luck. And in the case of the Moon, they were blinded by their own prejudices. So the result was that scientists concluded in the seventies that both the Moon and Mars were barren dry “dead” planets, no water meant little to no possibility of life and little reason to consider sending follow-up missions. So exploration of the Moon and Mars literally languished for decades as scientists went on to study the far more interesting (or so they thought) outer planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
What would have been the result if scientists had realized in the seventies that Mars or the Moon had significant amounts of water? To put it mildly, there would have been vastly greater interest in exploring and examining both. In fact it’s even possible that manned trips to the Moon would have continued, and there certainly wouldn’t have been a decades long delay before sending another lander to Mars. That’s how science works though, there are often halts or delays because of misconceptions or the merest of chances. Sooner or later it corrects itself though and our understanding of our world and the Universe around us increases once again. For example, scientists just discovered that a number of dinosaurs … never existed at all!
How the hell did that happen? You guessed it … it’s a topic for a future post.
(The above images of craters on Mars are being used in accordance with NASA guidelines, they were taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona. The crater is about 6m (20 ft) wide and knee deep. For a picture of a much larger crater with a permanent ice lake at the bottom of it, click here. Look at it closely, see any ruins? Me neither, but at least one person does. I think the fellow has an exceptionally vivid imagination, how’s that for being diplomatic?)
I applied for Federal Stimulus Funds, and they sent me a clunker that had been crushed into a cube
Well, I guess I should have expected that. It’s been pretty much the story of my life lately. There comes a point where one gets really tired of making lemonade out of all the lemons zinging their way, and I never much liked lemonade in the first place. Life goes on though, as does Doug’s Darkworld. So there.
However, Doug’s Darkworld is going to slow down a bit in the near future. I am launching a new site where my vast and varied collection of writings will be easily accessible with a click or two. Including a great number of my old and popular posts on Doug’s Darkworld. This will both make a lot more of my writing available to people, and allow me to streamline Doug’s Darkworld and concentrate even more on making each post a quality post. I’ve written some sci fi and psychological fantasy stories too, different fare indeed from this blog. Brace yourself. In other local news, a Princess has contacted me regarding getting one of my cats cloned. How many people can make that claim? My cat and I are of course very flattered (cats show being flattered by acting exactly as they did before, talk about savoir faire.) How did my cat, Sir Handsome Fungus Bug, come to be famous in some quarters? Damned if I know.
In world news, people are protesting the G-20 summit, claiming “capitalism has failed.” The truth of the matter is, they’re probably right. As far as I can tell, for the most part when talking about both classes and nations, the rich are getting richer are and the poor are getting poorer. It’s certainly the case in the USA, where the middle class has been losing ground since the seventies. It’s not surprising really, in the modern world capitalism is just a euphemism for “let the rich make the rules.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that that’s probably not the best strategy for a nation state in the long run, thought it will make the rich fabulously wealthy.
They caught some wannabe terrorists in the USA. Wannabe terrorists so clueless that they left piles of evidence leading the authorities right to them. Some of them are even being charged with conspiring to build a WMD. Right, now a home-made bomb is a WMD. None of these jokers sounds like they were much of a threat, and it’s a good bet before the dust settle it will turn out that FBI informants were the main instigators of the plots to begin with. Of course the media is making a huge deal out of these non-events and treating it like the country has been spared from some terrible threat. Right. When I was a kid some nutbar making bombs was considered what it was, some nutbar making bombs, not a threat to the nation at large. And if these cases fizzle when they get to court, which they so often do, the media won’t say a peep.
Which leads me again to the oft uttered liberal media claptrap. In the 60s when we actually had an independent media in the USA, Americans saw pictures of US forces in Vietnam almost every night in the news. It in fact was one of the major factors that convinced millions of Americans that the war simply wasn’t worth the cost. Now show even one still photo of a dying American, and it’s a huge controversy. Right, can’t have people seeing the reality of war. As for the “it shows disrespect to him and his family argument,” spare me. The people who are showing disrespect for the dead Marine and his family are the people that sent him to a godforsaken land on the far side of the world to die. In any event, the media does have a slight liberal slant and always will, because, d’oh, liberal types tend to go into academia and the media while conservative types are more drawn to the military and business. Go figure. In any event, my point is that comparing coverage of Vietnam to today’s media coverage of our foreign wars, the idea that the media has a liberal bias is a joke. For the most part today’s media just repeats White House talking points as if they were news. How is that a liberal bias?
In some final non-depressing news, for those who missed my tweet, there has been an amazing discovery in the Solar system. It turns out there’s water on the Moon, far more water than anyone ever dreamt of. Granted it’s in the form of chemicals in soil for the most part, although there appears to be actual ice in some craters. Still, the Moon is far wetter than anyone imagined, which is both an intriguing mystery that scientists will have to unravel … and more importantly, a huge boost for the idea of human exploration and bases on the Moon. It’s literally the biggest Moon news since the Apollo missions.
And frankly the way we keep screwing up here, we may need to settle on the Moon sooner than we think. I’m ready. Have a great weekend everyone.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and is central to illustrating the post. I got in on this fine site. I’m guessing the credit and copyright belong to Buell Motorcycles. It’s actually a crushed motorcycle, but it was the best cubed vehicle picture I could fine. And for those who may have suspected such, this post was written backwards. I came up with the title first, and liked it so much I wrote a post to match it. It’s like the old joke, what does it mean when your feet smell and your nose runs? It means you’re built upside down.)
NGC 3621, Glorg’s Darkplanet, Bear Dogs, Proconsuls, to Felinae maculosus atrox
This is NGC 3621, a galaxy far far away. Click on it for a slightly larger version, or click here for an even cooler (but alas copyrighted) view. NGC 3621 is about 22 million light years away, and thus isn’t even a part of our Local Group of galaxies. And as far I was able to determine, it isn’t part of any group of galaxies, making NGC 3621 truly an island universe sailing alone through the cosmos. Our own Milk Way is one of a cluster of 30 odd galaxies, most of them mere scrap heaps compared to our fine galaxy. The only other contender for the finest galaxy in the Local Group is the Andromeda Galaxy. We’re going to settle their hash though, the Milky Way is speeding toward the Andromeda Galaxy at as much as 140 kps, or about 500,000 kph (that’s over 300,000 mph) and we will slam into them in about 2.5 billion years. The collision will be incredibly spectacular and well worth the wait, trust me.
Moving right along, pictures like this never cease to amaze me. There’s certainly a very real possibility that right now somewhere in NGC 3621 aliens are staring raptly at a picture of the Milky Way as they read a post on Glorg’s DarkPlanet. Of course even if they have telescopes that make the Hubble look like a Cracker Jack ® prize, they aren’t staring at us. No, they are staring at Earth as it was about 22 million years ago. This was the early Miocene era, a time when Earth was cooling down from a much warmer era and in a very real way beginning the transition to the world we know and love. Grasslands were just starting to spread around the globe, and while the forbears of most modern animals were around, for the most part there were only a few animals we would recognize today. This little puppy was the apex predator of the day:
Its called a Bear Dog, or Amphicyonidae. There were all sorts of different types, most of which would have no trouble having one of us for a meal. I certainly wouldn’t want to meet one in a back alley, or anywhere for that matter. Fortunately they have been extinct for millions of years. Another predator hassling our ancestors at the time would have been Neocynodesmus, also known as false sabre tooth tigers. Think dogs with really big teeth, nasty business. There were little ancestors of the horse, forest dwelling animals less than 1 meter tall. The elephants of the day were small aquatic animals similar to a hippopotamus, we wouldn’t even call them elephants. No dogs of course, the ancestor of the dog was around though, but it was a small yappy coyote sized animal that looked kind of like a civet, but not as smart or handsome looking.
What were our ancestors doing among this strange menagerie? Well, they weren’t making cave paintings or arrowheads. Still the apes had separated from the monkeys at least and were on their way to greater things. An ape called Proconsul africanus was more than likely the ancestor of all the great apes, including our own species, homo sapiens. Handome fellow isn’t he?
I know that 60% of Americans have doubts about the theory of Evolution, but for the other 40%, that’s the ape that caused all the fuss. Proconsul was smarter than the average monkey, lived in the trees, and subsisted on a diet of small stupid ancestral dogs that proconsul was able to scoop up off the forest floor. OK, I made that last part up. Proconsul most likely existed primarily on fruit.
Some early Micone animals were more familiar. The frogs and toads and salamander would be pretty similar to today’s. There were plenty of birds, though of course not the same species as today. Still, little songbirds in the brush are pretty much that same even if the colours were different. There were recognizable ducks and geese. Turtles and crocodiles have remained basically unchanged for tens of millions of years, they’d be familiar. Bugs and spiders were still bugs and spiders, ants and bees would be unrecognizable from our familiar ones. There have been snakes since the there were dinosaurs, no strangeness there. When nature hits on a good idea, it sticks with it. There will likely be snakes slithering in the grass long after humans are history.
And of course hanging out in the trees would be another easily recognizable animal:
Meet Proailurus, the world’s first cat. Handsome fellow, isn’t he? Note the stripes and spots, yes, this is the ancestor of all living cats, from the lion to the tiger to the little moggy quietly hacking up a hairball in your slippers as you read this. Proailurus was a little larger than the modern house cat, and was at least partially arboreal, with at least partially retractable claws. Yes, for about 20 million years cats have been easily recognizable as cats. A lot of other animals also evolved cat-like features around the same time, but they are mostly now extinct or evolved further into something distinctly uncatlike. Nature knows a good idea when it sees it though, and like the snakes, there’s a real good chance there will be cats hiding in the brush long after humans are history. In fact in terms of the number of different habitats occupied, cats are the most successful mammal on Earth. Take that Fido.
(The NGC 3621 image is from NASA and is being used legally within their guidelines. The bear dog pic is from here, which appears to be some sort of academic site, and I am claiming it as Fair Use under US copyright law. Heck, I’m claiming all the rest as Fair Use under US copyright law, they are not being used for profit, yadda, yadda, yadda. Basically they are institutional pics that have already been copied all over the net and I’m not even sure who to attribute them too. The galaxy pic I didn’t use was the property of a professional artist/photographer and there simply would be no way to use the image and claim Fair Use. Coming someday, a post about the origins of the calico cat, including the almost unknown sabre tooth calico: Felinae maculosus atrox.)
The Axis of Evil: The CMBR Dipole Anisotropy
In my search for paranormal mysteries to write about, I came across some intriguing scientific mysteries. Cool. One of my thoughts in old age is that real scientific mysteries are vastly more cool than basically made up things like UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. I mean, scientific mysteries are real, not a conglomeration of anecdotes, amateur research, and wishful thinking. Yes, I’m really starting to develop disdain for people who can’t or won’t grasp that science is backed up by vast amounts of empirical data and very solid research by hundreds of thousands of really smart scientists over centuries of time. In their rush to dismiss the judgement of science, critics of science often demonstrate a profound ignorance of both science and historical fact. And by doing so, pass up opportunities to actually question scientific theory. So so many people refuse to accept the Big Bang theory, yet none have even bothered to study the theory in enough depth to actually understand its weak points. And the CMBR dipole anisotropy is a weak point in our scientific understanding of the Universe, no doubt about it.
So what the hell is the CMBR dipole anisotropy? I’ve helpfully illustrated it above, all clear now? OK, it took me awhile to understand this picture, so here goes. The CMBR is the cosmic microwave background radiation, basically the afterglow from the Big Bang and the early days of the Universe. Well, like every other “thing” in the universe, the CMBR is red shifted or blue shifted depending on whether we are travelling toward or away from it. And lo and behold, it turns out that we are moving relative to the CMBR at about 600 kps. Um, this is really fast. It in fact dwarfs the other motions the Earth is doing: orbiting the Sun, our galaxy’s spin, etc. IE the image above is a picture of the sky, and the blue parts of the universe are moving toward us and the red parts are moving away. So in relationship to the original Universe, the Earth, and presumably all nearby stars and galaxies, are moving at an incredible rate of speed. (For my American readers, 600 kps is about 375 miles per second or over 1,000,000 mph.)
Cool, eh? Um, no. There really isn’t any good way as of yet to explain why we should be moving so fast in reference to the CMBR. In fact this little problem is so vexing that some cosmologists have dubbed the CMBR dipole anisotropy the “Axis of Evil.” For awhile many cosmologists did the thing scientists often do when they get results that threaten to overturn existing theory, especially a theory that has some solid experimental validation. They hoped that subsequent studies and observations would correct the discrepancy somehow.
For example, in the 90s with the Pleiades mystery. The Pleiades is a constellation and an actual cluster of stars near the Earth (comparatively speaking.) It’s close enough to Earth that its distance from Earth can be calculated fairly easily and accurately. And since the Pleiades is a bunch of stars, we can get pretty good average values of how bright certain types of stars are. And since we know how far away the Pleiades are, we can use these values to calculate how far away other similar stars are that are too far away from Earth to directly measure their distance from us. So in a very real sense, the distance to the Pleiades is the “yardstick” used to calculate how far away every other object in the visible Universe is. Well, in the 80s they launched a satellite, the Hipparcos mission, that was to measure the distance to the Pleiades even more accurately than could be done from Earth, thus allowing scientists to more accurately gauge how far away everything else in the Universe was.
To astronomer’s surprise, the data from Hipparcos showed that the Pleiades was about ten percent closer than all other measurements showed. This was a huge difference, and a huge problem. This meant that pretty much every calculated distance to astronomical objects was vastly in error, which caused problems for all sorts of astronomical and cosmological theories. Astronomers began to frantically recalculate astronomical distances calculated from Earth to see if there was some sort of problem somewhere, and the Hipparcos team went over their data with a fine tooth comb. Fortunately after much head scratching it was determined that the Hipparcos team had overlooked a rather obvious in retrospect error in how the satellite was programmed to measure distances. Phew.
However, right now it’s not looking as promising for the CMBR dipole anisotropy, several studies seem to confirm that it is a real observation. And no one has come up with any explanation for it. Granted it’s not making much news, but when it comes right down to it, very little that goes on in the scientific world makes the news much. And when we come to stuff as arcane and hard to explain as cosmologyy and the CMBR dipole anisotropy, well, even I hesitated to write about it.
In fact in some ways the main reason I wrote about it was to point out that no one was writing about it. Especially layman critics of the Big Bang theory, mostly the religiously inspired. I mean, here’s some real strong ammo to use to discredit the Big Bang theory, and yet none of the critics is apparently even aware of it? Which illustrates that most critics of standard accepted theories are coming from an ideological point rather than logical one. You’d think that if one was going to debate a point, one would at least familiarize themself with the topic. For example I was arguing with a person who thinks the Moon landings were a hoax, and I pointed out that the Russians had compared our Moon rocks with their Moon rocks and concluded they were genuine. My opponent had a conniption de merde and claimed that since the Russians hadn’t gone to the Moon, they could not possibly have Moon rocks to compare to the rocks brought back by the Apollo Missions. Apparently he was unaware, as are most people, that three Russian robotic missions to the Moon in the seventies did indeed carry back Moon rock samples to Russia.
I mean, I can understand why most people aren’t aware of the Russian sample return missions to the Moon, but if you’re going to argue that the Apollo Missions were hoaxed and the Moon rocks were faked, shouldn’t you do at least some rudimentary research into your topic? It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that most people believe what they want to believe, without ever actually taking the time to investigate the factual basis of their beliefs. So moving right along, I’ll continue to follow the CMBR dipole anisotropy story and post a follow-up when there are any new developments. And if I have made any factual errors above, please point them out to me, since I at least believe I want to learn the facts about what I believe. Gotta start somewhere.
(The above image is produced mostly by NASA and other government funded research, and I’m reasonably sure it’s public domain under US copyright law. I got it from this site, credit: DMR, COBE, NASA, Four-Year Sky Map. The first Russian Luna probe that returned samples from the Moon was actually pretty cool, as evidenced by the fine array of products available to commemorate it. In fact, I know now that my life is incomplete and will remain incomplete until I have a Luna-16 coffee mug.)
Lost in Space
In my last post I extolled the positive aspects of the US space program and space exploration in general. Today, just to play the devil’s advocate, and to be true to Doug’s Darkworld form, a less flattering look at the US space program. A long time reader sent me a Tom Wolfe editorial about the space race. Basically Mr Wolfe points out that after the race to the Moon was won, NASA almost immediately began to downsize. Their budget was cut by Congress in the years to follow., and the US space program wilted on the vine. I maintain the esteemed Mr Wolfe’s take on the situation is optimistic. Not only did the USA cut funding for space exploration after the Moon shots, most of what money we did spend was horribly, tragically, wastefully, misspent.
Let me explain. The Apollo program was humanity at its best. The USA managed to put a man on the Moon (many men in fact) with modest loss of life using technology that was barely adequate to the task. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of science was done during the Apollo missions. Some, especially the later Apollo missions, but it was mostly tacked on, the main focus was simply getting people to the Moon. So, as Tom Wolfe says, after this great start, why didn’t the human exploration of space continue? Very simply put, they intended to, but in true American fashion, they decided to go for broke. Yes, I am talking about the Space Shuttle. Most people think, if they think about it at all, that the Space Shuttle was the next logical step in space exploration. No, actually, it wasn’t. The Space Shuttle was a very deliberate effort to skip several decades of research and build a 21st century space vehicle in the 1970s. If it had worked, it would have put the USA in an unassailable lead in space exploration, leaving the Russians and everyone else in the dust.
They key phrase here is “if it worked.” The people promoting the shuttle used the most optimistic numbers possible to justify and sell the shuttle. They essentially touted it as a space airliner that would make trips to space routine, cheap, and safe. It was an exciting concept. And yes, if the Wright brothers had decided their second plane would be a DC-3, that would have been exciting too. The Wright brothers knew better, and NASA should have too. It’s not that there weren’t some very smart people standing around saying, “Um, have we thought this through?”
They hadn’t, and the results were all too predictable. The Space Shuttle sucked up the lion’s share of NASAs budget for decades, and only delivered about 10% of its promised capabilities. It’s incredibly expensive to operate, and only goes up half a dozen times a year, instead of the 50-100 yearly trips that we so confidently predicted. And as far as being safe, NASA hit .000 on that one. Half the shuttle fleet has blown up so far, it averages one passenger death every eight trips. It’s basically the most dangerous passenger vehicle ever put into production. Wildly over-budget, couldn’t perform even half of what it was supposed to do, and incredibly dangerous to boot. If that’s not failure, I don’t know what is.
Meanwhile every other aspect of the USA space program languished for lack of funds. Manned exploration, deep space exploration, and booster technology all got short shrift. And the rest of the world worked hard to catch up, the Russians for example got far more done in near Earth orbit than the USA. They showed for example that you don’t need a space shuttle to supply and man a space station, probably the number one “purpose” the shuttle was sold for. And the Challenger explosion put an end to using the shuttle to launch satellites or carry hordes of passengers to space.
In fact, by any logic, the shuttle program should have been cancelled then and there. As most readers know, logic plays little or no role in America’s national priorities, and like a bad poker player we simply kept pouring more money into a failed program in a quixotic attempt to make it work. Then the Columbia blew up and that was that. The Space Shuttle program was dead, all that remained was to bury the corpse. Even then we still couldn’t admit outright failure, and the remaining shuttles kept flying while we worked out what to do next.
And what was that? The Orion, the “next generation” in manned space vehicles. It’s pictured above, remind you of anything? It should, it looks remarkably like the Apollo capsule that preceded the space shuttle. That’s right, NASA’s successor to the Space Shuttle is simply a souped up Apollo … something NASA could have done in the 70s if they hadn’t tried to leapfrog a few decades of space exploration technology. I mean, the proof is in the pudding, if the Space Shuttle had been a success, we’d be building an upgraded shuttle, not returning to the 1960s. Frankly the best thing I can say about the space shuttle program is that it’s over, and the manned exploration of space can pick up where we left off in the 70s.
In any event, I’m talking about politics and bureaucracy, no disrespect intended for the fine scientists, engineers, and astronauts who have devoted their careers, and sometimes their lives, to the exploration of space and the advancement of human knowledge thereof.
(The above image came from this page and is used accordingly: “I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby grant the permission to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.” It’s a mock-up of the new Orion capsule. No, the bird on top is not part of the capsule. And finally, for those who haven’t heard it before: NASA and the Navajo.)
Forty Years Ago Today Humans First Walked on the Moon
It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. I remember it well, my parents and I watched it live on a TV in the rec room downstairs in our Illinois home. It was late at night, I’m sure my little brother and sister were in bed. What I mostly remember is how I was hoping something interesting would happen. I was twelve years old and Star Trek and Lost in Space were already old hat, so a fuzzy black and white image of some guy climbing down a ladder wasn’t all too exciting. If there was ever a time for aliens to jump out with bottles of champagne to welcome us to the galaxy, that was it.
Alas, no aliens, moon plants, or anything. The disappointments of youth, what can I say. Now of course I know what an amazing moment it was, and even though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, I appreciate it now. I mean, on July 21st 1969 the human race became a spacefaring species. Maybe I’m going out on a limb, but I think that the Moon landing is easily one of the ten most important events in human history. Certainly in the top 100. For the rest of my life I’m going to be occasionally thrilled that I got to witness this epochal moment. Only a small crowd of gawkers saw Columbus wade ashore, over five hundred million people witnessed Armstrong step onto the Moon. No one in the Soviet Union got to watch though, the authorities there were a little embarrassed that the USA beat them to the Moon.
For my part I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate everyone that worked to make the Moon landings a reality. It’s a great thing that humans can come together and accomplish difficult and dangerous feats that don’t involve trying to think of ways to blow people up. Granted it was driven by a desire to “beat” the Russians, but in part or in whole I am sure that the people who made Apollo a reality were driven by higher motives than just to show the Russians who was best. If I ever get a chance to congratulate any of them in person, I will, but for now this post will have to do. Good work people! I almost said “good work guys” but I think it’s safe to say that there were women in the Apollo program. I hope so at least, if some reader wants to correct me, well, it happens frequently.
The picture above was one taken by the NASA Lunar Orbiter program in 1966-67. It was a series of five probes to map the Moon’s surface in preparation for the Apollo landings. All but forgotten now, they were a pretty big deal at the time. The recently restored image was even referred to as the “picture of the century.” Click on it for the full size version, and the full impact. There had been pictures sent back from the Moon before, but they were looking down pictures that were little different than what could be seen from Earth through a telescope. This picture was the first to really show the Moon’s surface in a way comparable to what one sees on Earth. It showed for the first time that the Moon had hills and valleys and a landscape just like Earth, that the Moon was a real place that people could walk on, not just some thing hanging in the sky. I chose it because for me it evokes just how real this event was, the history books can’t really capture how exciting the race to the Moon was, it was a big part of our culture and our lives for nearly a decade.
Lastly, a special word of thanks and commemoration to all those who died, American, Russian, and others, in the effort to make us a spacefaring race. Hundreds have died actually, most of them in dreadful launch pad explosions. And of course most people know about the Challenger and Columbia disasters. For my part, I want to pay a special tribute to “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee. They were the crew of Apollo 1 who died in their capsule during a training exercise on January 27th 1967. Again, it’s hard to express what a shocking event this was at the time. I was a withdrawn ten year old kid, and I remember just what a big deal this was to the grown ups. Even now it’s sad to think about, the poor fellows not only lost their chance to go to the Moon, they lost it all. And sadly, like most US space exploration fatalities, it shouldn’t have happened. Suffice it to say some corners were cut in the effort to get a man to the Moon.
This however is a post extolling the good things about space exploration, and hopefully illustrating in some small way how people felt about it a the time. The astronauts involved still remember, they want us to go to Mars next!
“I would not see our candle blown out in the wind. It is a small thing, this dear gift of life handed us mysteriously out of immensity. I would not have that gift expire… If I seem to be beating a dead horse again and again, I must protest: No! I am beating, again and again, living man to keep him awake and move his limbs and jump his mind… What’s the use of looking at Mars through a telescope, sitting on panels, writing books, if it isn’t to guarantee, not just the survival of mankind, but mankind surviving forever!” — Ray Bradbury
(The above image is a NASA image and is free to use so long as it is not used to imply that NASA endorses a commercial product. Doug’s Darkworld is about as far from a commercial endeavour as one can get, and I also hereby certify that NASA does not endorse Doug’s Darkworld. Phew, safe now. As a final note, a lot of animals have died in the exploration of space. Few, if any, of them were volunteers. God rest their souls, so to speak. I not even sure what to think about it, but thought they deserved at least a mention in my footnote.)
