Category: Science

Book Review: The World Without Us – by Alan Weisman

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, China, Climate Change, Energy, Environmental Protection, Four Stars, Nature, Science, SustainabilityLeave a comment

World Without Us

Imagine all the people in the world disappeared today. Gone. I recognize this is a hypothetical scenario, one that has a low likelihood of happening, but — it could happen. An Ebola-like plague could sweep the world and eradicate the human race in a matter of a few weeks. There have been doomsday books, like Stephen King’s The Stand that were based on just that premise. My favorite book about this subject is Earth Abides by George Stewart. Both novels start out with just about all people dead, and one single survivor eventually finding another one, starting the long process of building a new world from scratch and from the ruins of the old world.

The World Without Us is not a novel. It is a speculative work taking on many of the controversies of our society, including overpopulation, climate change and runaway pollution. Every chapter explores, from its own viewpoint, what it would be like if humans simply were no longer here.

Here is an example. What would happen in New York City if humans disappeared. Surprisingly, the city would come to pieces very quickly, must faster than other places out west.

Schuber peers down into a square pit beneath the Van Siclen Avenue station in Brooklyn, where each minute 650 gallons of natural groundwater gush from the bedrock. Gesturing over the roaring cascade, he indicates four submersible cast-iron pumps that take turns laboring against gravity to stay ahead. Such pumps run on electricity. When the power fails, things can get difficult very fast. Following the World Trade Center attack, an emergency pump train bearing a jumbo portable diesel generator pumped out 27 times the volume of Shea Stadium. Had the Hudson River actually burst through the PATH train tunnels that connect New York’s subways to New Jersey, as was greatly feared, the pump train— and possibly much of the city— would simply have been overwhelmed.

Weisman, Alan (2007-07-10). The World Without Us (p. 25). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.

650 gallons of natural groundwater run into that one subway station every minute, and pumps must keep running 24 hours a day to keep it try. When the power runs out (and that’s another chapter), in a half hour the water would be high enough to flood the tracks and trains could no longer pass. In 36 hours the entire subways system would fill up. Weisman goes on:

Even if it weren’t raining, with subway pumps stilled, that would take no more than a couple of days, they estimate. At that point, water would start sluicing away soil under the pavement. Before long, streets start to crater. With no one unclogging sewers, some new watercourses form on the surface. Others appear suddenly as waterlogged subway ceilings collapse. Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s 4, 5, and 6 trains corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river.

Weisman, Alan (2007-07-10). The World Without Us (pp. 25-26). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.

This is just about one of our great cities.

There are 441 operating nuclear power plants in the world. Without the regulating eye of humans, many of these plants would go through some form of catastrophic failure and eventual meltdown. Imagine 441 Chernobyls around the world. Check out this map and find how close you live to one? Hey Australia! Safest place on Earth in case of a meltdown.

world_map_nuclear
Source: International Nuclear Safety Center at Argonne National Laboratory.

This map is from 2005, I could not find a newer one, but given how long it takes to build such a plant, and considering that they are not building many more, it’s pretty close.

The World Without Us was published in 2007. Given today’s pace of development, and pollution in China (check out this link and be shocked), and runaway fossil-fuel-burning, things are much worse than described by Weisman in 2007, when there were only 6.5 billion people on the planet, rather than seven.

We’re adding one million people to the planet every four days.

The World Without Us reads like a fast-paced thriller, where the bad guys are out the make the world go away. As I read the book, I realized that I was in it, and it wasn’t a thriller, it wasn’t a novel, it was a giant reality show, and my life, and the life of my children, and their children, was on the line.

Don’t you understand what I’m tryin’ to say
Can’t you feel the fears I’m feelin’ today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave
Take a look around you boy, it’s bound to scare you boy

— Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction

Choose not to read this book at your own peril.

Rating - Four Stars

Senate Votes on Climate Change

On By Norbert HauptIn Climate Change, ScienceLeave a comment

Today the U.S. Senate voted that climate change was real, not a hoax. The vote was 98 – 1. Even Senator Inhofe, who I often ridicule here, voted affirmative. The lone nay vote was Roger Wicker (R–MS).

It is hard for me to swallow that people can still say that “climate change” is a hoax. What evidence do they need? Fourteen of the fifteen hottest years in history were in this century. We went over 400 ppm for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, measured on Mauna Kea. This is the highest reading in 800,000 years. There are people that say this is all coincidence.

Inhofe says that “man is arrogant” for thinking he can change the climate. Man doesn’t need to be arrogant to mess things up. Man messes things up by accident and ignorance alone. Look at the great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast swirling vortex north of Hawaii.

During his first 1,000-mile crossing of the gyre, Moore calculated half a pound for every 100 square meters of debris on the surface, and arrived at 3 million tons of plastic. His estimate, it turned out, was corroborated by U.S. Navy calculations. It was the first of many staggering figures he would encounter. And it only represented visible plastic: an indeterminate amount of larger fragments get fouled by enough algae and barnacles to sink. In 1998, Moore returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean’s surface.

Weisman, Alan (2007-07-10). The World Without Us (p. 123). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.

So man can foul up the ocean by dumping stuff into it, from ships, through rivers, through leaking landfills.

What stunned Charles Moore most was learning where it came from. In 1975, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences had estimated that all oceangoing vessels together dumped 8 million pounds of plastic annually. More recent research showed the world’s merchant fleet alone shamelessly tossing around 639,000 plastic containers every day. But littering by all the commercial ships and navies, Moore discovered, amounted to mere polymer crumbs in the ocean compared to what was pouring from the shore.

Weisman, Alan (2007-07-10). The World Without Us (pp. 121-123). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.

639,000 plastic containers dumped into the ocean every day! Senator Inhofe, I would think you agree that we are definitely fouling up the ocean. What makes you think we’re not fouling up the atmosphere as well? Is it because you can see plastic floating, but you can’t see the carbon dioxide? You believe in God, right, so you do believe in things you can’t see.

We’re messing with the planet big time, and it’s about time our leadership recognizes it and takes responsibility for it on our behalf. After all, they represent us. It was refreshing to see Obama stand up for science yesterday in the State of the Union Address, and it was encouraging to see the Senate vote today.

Pretty soon the deniers will simply look ridiculous in their affirmations, as  ridiculous as a medical doctor in a 1955 commercial telling us we should smoke Camel cigarettes.

Musings about the Night Sky

On By Norbert HauptIn Astronomy, Science2 Comments

When we look up at night in the city, if we’re not under a street light, we see a few stars. If you have ever been out in the desert at night, it seems like there are a million stars. In reality, we can only see about 4,000 to 6,000 stars with the naked eye.

Furthermore, those stars are all located pretty close to our solar neighborhood. Some are just a few light years, or tens of light years away.

Here is a diagram of the 50 stars closest to us, all of them within four to 16 light years. Interestingly, only nine of those stars are bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.

Here is another chart showing major stars within 50 light years. There are about 2,000 stars within that distance.

Some very popular recognizable stars are in the Orion constellation.

Orion
Orion by Akira Fujii – Hubble Space Telescope [click for credit]
In the Orion, there are the four main stars forming the outer rectangle and three main stars in the belt.

  • Betelgeuse (left upper – 427 light years)
  • Belatrix (right upper – 243 light years)
  • Saiph (left lower – 720 light years)
  • Rigel (right lower – 773 light years)
  • Alnitak (left belt – 812 light years)
  • Alnilam (center belt – 1350 light years)
  • Mintaka (right belt – 916 light years)

As you can see, they are all comparatively far away, so they are very bright stars, but all are in the approximately 1,000 light year range. So let’s visualize the size of a 1,000 light year bubble around us.

The galaxy shown in the picture below is similar to our Milky Way, at least for the sake of this mind exercise. Please notice the little circle at the tip of the red arrow.

Milky Way 2

Our sun is about 28,000 light years from the center of our galaxy. If you enlarge the picture, you’ll see a little circle at the end of the arrow. That’s approximately the sun would be with respect to the center of such a galaxy, and the bubble encircles the area of all the stars we can see with our naked eye on Earth. If you go outside right now and look up in the night sky, every star you see is actually in this little red circle. That’s how far we can see. That’s the “approximately 1,000 light year bubble.”

The point is, we can’t see very far.

In recent years, scientists at Caltech have come to the conclusion that half of all stars in the universe may be “rogue stars” which are stars that float outside of the major galaxies in the vast open spaces between. Such stars don’t have any neighbors, so there would be nothing in their 1,000 light year bubble. If we lived on a planet on such a star, there would be nothing in the night sky. No stars at all. Only endless blackness, and some “smudges” of light if there were any close-by galaxies. I wonder what psyche such a civilization would develop if the only celestial objects were moons (if any), planets (if any) and the occasional comets? Their entire mythology would be very different from ours.

On the other hand, if our sun were close to the center of the galaxy, where stars are packed tightly, our night sky would be glowing bright with light. We probably wouldn’t think of it as a night sky. It would just be somewhat less bright during the “night” phase of our days, when the sun was below the horizon. That, too, would have created a very different mythology.

So it turns out, night skies are not the same everywhere.

 

Motivation and Enlightenment by Michio Kaku

On By Norbert HauptIn Education, ScienceLeave a comment

Michio Kaku is a world-renowned scientist with a knack for educating the general, non-scientific public. This video is a great introduction to physics.  Yes, there are inaccuracies here, he glosses over much, but he is an excellent educator with a passion for his field. One of the best there is. I spent 42 minutes watching this, and I am grateful that I did.

Movie Review: The Theory of Everything

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, ScienceLeave a comment

Theory of EverythingIt is hard to imagine that there is a single educated human being on the planet that does not know who Stephen Hawking is. Most of us know him only as an utterly disabled person, a brain in a wheelchair. Most of us have bought his book A Brief History of Time, and most of us have not fully read the book.

The movie is based on the memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, by Jane Hawking, Stephen’s first wife of 30 years. The director is Academy Award winner James Marsh. The Theory of Everything is about the life of Stephen Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne in a riveting performance. I would not be surprised if this role resulted in an Oscar. Felicity Jones plays Hawking’s wife Jane.

When still a college student, Hawking fell in love with his future wife, fellow Cambridge student Jane Wilde. At the age of 21, Hawking was diagnosed with a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The doctor told him that he had two years to live. In the early years, his love for Jane, who fought tirelessly by his side, made the difference between utter depression and possible death versus the life of one of the world’s most preeminent scientists, today right up there next to Einstein in visibility and renown. There is no doubt that Hawking is known as one of the world’s greatest living minds.

As I watched the movie, there were tears in my eyes for long periods of time as I was absorbed in the phenomenal difficulties this human being suffered as a giant intellect trapped in a completely useless body with no way to communicate.

The movie, of course, progresses through time periods quickly and sometimes I was not able to make all the connections. That did not detract from the story and the impact. I simply went home and pulled up the Wikipedia Page on Hawking and within 15 minutes of reading put it all together – now even more in awe of the man and the story.

The Theory of Everything educated me, entertained me, motivated me and incented me to read more of Hawking’s later books. After all, A Brief History of Time was published 25 years ago, in 1988.

Rating: *** (out of 4)

Sen. Inhofe’s Folly

On By Norbert HauptIn Climate Change, Crack-Ups, Religion, ScienceLeave a comment

Voters just made it so Senator Inhofe will be the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe is one of the most vocal and devoted “climate deniers.” In 2012, he wrote a book titled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.

Inhofe cited the Bible:

“Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that ‘as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.’ My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

It is outrageous to me that we put a man like this into a position of immense power where he can jeopardize or wipe out the work of thousands, no millions of people who study climate science, who are responsible in their use of resources, who want to make sure that there is a world for our children to live comfortably in.

Quoting divine power or bronze-age scripture to make national (or international) policy regarding environmental responsibility is outrageous and we, the voters, should be outright ashamed for ourselves for allowing this to happen.

Inhofe belongs in a church, where he can spew drivel all day long to eager followers without really doing any damage.

I am worried now. But maybe I shouldn’t be worried. After all, God’s going to fix it, right?

Movie Review: Interstellar

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Science, Science Fiction, Time Travel6 Comments

InterstellarCooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a reluctant farmer and former pilot and engineer somewhere in the Midwest, maybe Iowa. The Earth is breathing its last breaths and everyone knows that within another generation or two, it won’t be habitable anymore.

His precocious and science-minded 10-year-old daughter, Murph, thinks there is a ghost in her room and on her bookshelves. One day, during a dust storm, she detects binary patters in the sand that collected on the floor in her room. When they figure out the patterns are GPS coordinates, they get in the truck for a trip.

What they find at the end of that road trip is something neither of them could have possibly expected. It would soon changes both of their lives drastically.

It is my self-imposed policy not to write reviews that spoil the movie, and in this case, I find that a very difficult task. So I’ll stop right here talking about the plot or the story, but rather tell you what was in it for me – and what may not be in it for many other viewers.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Interstellar is a huge science fiction epic with all the components that I love about science fiction. The problem with this film, if that actually is a problem, is that the viewer needs to have a solid background in a number of science fiction and science concepts to be able to understand the plot. The plot depends on those concepts. Viewers without that experience and knowledge would likely be lost and would not put the story together.

Be that as it may, for me, it was like Christmas of Science Fiction. It was all there.

Four and five dimensional spaces, tesseracts, and the phenomena a traveler along those dimensions might experience are central to the plot. A being that is able to travel in the fifth dimension, assuming time is the fourth, can roll time back and forth at will. Some of that happens in this movie.

I loved the realistic feeling of the interstellar space ship Endurance. The ship is basically a wheel that rotates at a speed of 5.6 times a minute to create an approximately earth-like gravity for the crew.

Interstellar1
[credit: Karl Tate, Infographics Artist]
At one point, there is an explosion on the ship and it starts spinning wildly out of control while nobody is on board. The crew is in a lander and their only chance of survival is to approach the spinning ship and match its rotation exactly, making the lander effectively spin like a top, while it slowly approaches the docking pad. I loved that scene. Matching velocities and rotations of independently spinning objects in space in one of my favorite space travel concepts. I can’t get enough of them.

Then there was time dilation. The Endurance had a crew of four. One stayed behind on the ship, while the other three went down to a planet in one of the landers. As it turns out, the planet was really close to a black hole, where gravity, time and space are sharply curved, causing the experience of time to change. One hour on the surface of the planet is equal to seven years on earth. If such a space traveler has any interest in coming home and seeing his family again, he can’t spend more than a few hours on that planet, lest they all be dead and gone. When they landed, things didn’t quite go right and they were delayed. When they eventually got back to the ship, their crew mate waiting for them for the few hours they were gone had aged 23 years.

There was Cooper Station, a huge generation ship, basically a spinning cylinder with human habitats inside of it, reminiscent of the Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama spacecraft.

There were a few hokey concepts too. For instance, the thought that we could ruin our own Earth in just a few decades from now so badly that an alien planet in another galaxy might be a better option seems very farfetched. But I could live with that.

I got a kick out of the ship’s robot, Interstellar‘s own version of R2D2, except really weird, too large and like a metal slab or a smart gravestone, that had me chuckle a few times.

And the music, the sound track, is superb: Hans Zimmer the greatest in the music business today. He gives another brilliant use of music to accentuate the drama.

Overall, watching Interstellar for me was just a lot of fun, one scene after the other. Science fiction came to life here, just like it should.

Science fiction doesn’t get any better than that – and don’t go if you’re not into that stuff. You won’t “get it.”

MASSIVE SPOILERS:

If you want to understand the various timelines, storylines, and general movie concepts, click on this link. It does an excellent job filling in the blanks if you watched the movie but didn’t get one thing or another.

Aliens

On By Norbert HauptIn Astronomy, Crack-Ups, Science, Technology1 Comment

aliens1There has been a lot of press lately about Boyd Bushman, a former Lockheed Martin and Texas Instruments engineer who died on August 7th at the age of 78, who left behind a video with claims about extraterrestrial life as evidenced by the Roswell aliens. Here is a link to one such article. It’s going to take a bit more than a story told by a goofy old man in a poorly made video, showing grainy photographs about something that supposedly happened 67 years ago, to make me buy into little grey men with big heads.

Before I give my thoughts, though, I should state that I am absolutely certain (and note I don’t use the word “believe” here) that there is alien life outside of our planet. There may well be alien life within our own solar system, in the water moons of Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus. But that’s just our front yard. There are 100 to 200 billion stars in our own galaxy, and even if only one in one thousand of those stars has a planet that could sustain life, and if only one in one thousand of those planets actually has life, and if only one in one thousand of those planets has developed intelligent life, there are still 100 – 200 planets in our own galaxy that have intelligent life – aliens.

Then there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe as we know it. That means that there would be 10 to 20 trillion intelligent civilizations in the universe. We are just one of those. So yes, there are aliens.

However, the idea that aliens like those that Bushman describes, are humanoid, is utterly improbably. If they had developed from common ancestors with humans, it would be understandable. But it is hard to imagine how those brothers of ours left the Earth some 50,000 years ago and went to colonize a planet 65 light years away, with just enough evolutionary divergence to become bald, smaller, frailer and have bigger heads and eyes, but still retain two legs, with knees bent forward, ten toes and ten fingers, two ears, two eyes, a mouth, a nose and a skull above it all with a brain shaped like a large human brain. The odds of aliens being humanoid are infinitesimally small.

Bushman says that the aliens communicated with humans telepathically. Let’s assume for a moment that telepathy exists, and two brains can communicate ideas across “thin air” without any other means, even though there is not one shred of evidence that such a feat is actually possible. Then it would make sense that two humans, with the same communications gear (our brains) could communicate with each other by that method. My question is: does telepathy use language? Is telepathy bound by language? Two healthy humans with high IQs cannot communicate with each other if one only speaks English and the other only Japanese or any other language. Anyone that has ever traveled knows what that means. If you don’t know the language, you have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the other person’s head – all you have left is body language, and that does not convey complex concepts. But here we have alien beings, presumably completely unrelated to humans, with no shared DNA,  with completely different evolutionary background (even though they look like small frail humans for some reason), and they can walk into a room and telepathically communicate with humans?

We have shared our planet with intelligent beings for as long as humanity has existed. Those beings are the whales, dolphins most prominently. Dolphins are thought by many researchers to be just as intelligent as humans. They simply didn’t start developing tools due to their natural environment and the evolutionary path they took. But they have language. And in all the centuries that we have shared with dolphins, in the decades that researchers and linguists have tried to learn the dolphin language, we have not yet succeeded. And here are dolphins, which share a large amount of DNA with us, who live on our planet with us, and we can’t communicate with them.

But aliens just crash at Roswell, get transported to Area 51, and start teaching our engineers advanced concepts?

Bushman says that the aliens come from a planet that’s 65 light years away but the trip only takes about one hour. We humble humans have so far not found any evidence that it is possible to travel faster than light. That is not to say that someone else hasn’t figured that out. So let’s assume that these aliens indeed have ships that can travel 65 light years in an hour.

Why don’t they have a shuttle service and a spaceport here on Earth? We could travel to their planet for lunch and be back at the office mid-afternoon for a meeting. Think about the trade, think about the cultural exchange we could have with such an ability to travel? Why did they come here in 1947, and then every few years, in secret, to be spotted on misty nights in the woods, killing cows, abducting humans, just to hide again? What’s with the secrecy? If they knocked on my door, I’d let them in. If they wanted to take my blood samples, go ahead. If they wanted to take me on a trip 65 light years to their planet, I’d go in a minute, and so would another million people.

Why hide in Area 51 surrounded by old Lockheed engineers?

Then, of course, there is the question whether our all so secret government really could keep such a story covered this long. So when Obama got elected, and he asked to get a tour of Area 51 and see the aliens presumably still living there, they told him, no, that was classified? I don’t buy it. A story that big would not be kept under wraps. Somebody would be cleaning the motel rooms where the aliens lived. Somebody would be cooking for them. Somebody would be manufacturing suits that fit them. Somebody would be building weird stuff based on their technologies.

Yet, there is not a single tweet with a picture of one of them. There is no Facebook post. There is no picture on Instagram. Nothing. No leaks, no real evidence, in 67 years! That is not possible.

Ah, of course, there is Boyd Bushman, with his grainy photographs held up in his goofy video. Maybe I have it all wrong.

Does God Love Americans More than Africans?

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Misleading Statistics, Religion, ScienceLeave a comment

I believe in the power of prayer because I know so many people all over the world have been praying for me. I join you in prayer now for the recovery of others.

— Nina Pham, American Nurse and Ebola Survivor

So God saved three American healthcare workers from Ebola. I wonder why he chose to let 10,000 deeply religious and hard-praying Africans die?

Is it because we’re not praying for the anonymous Africans since we don’t know them and their names are not all over the news?

Might it be because Americans have lots of money that can buy very expensive medicine that Africans can’t afford?

Opinion of Global Warming by Congressional District

On By Norbert HauptIn Climate Change, Environmental Protection, Science, Sustainability1 Comment

Below is the map of how people responded to the question: “Is global warming a threat to the environment?”

The deeper the red, the more the answer was Yes. The deeper the blue and purple, the more No.

What I take away from that is:

In the cities, in the large metropolitan areas and where most of the universities are, we are leaning to the red, to the Yes. In the coal and oil states we’re in the deep No. And then there is Texas and the South.

Global Warming by Congressional District
Global Warming by Congressional District [click to enlarge]
This link gets you to the actual map, where you can search for your own zip code, and scan for results by county, zip code, congressional district, senatorial district and other filters. You can zoom in and out, and pan the map around.

The most important point I took away from this poll is this: The question was not: “Do you think that global warming is man-made?” Whether it is man-made or not is not part of the question. It was: “Is global warming a threat to the environment?”

It’s pretty hard for me to come up with a scenario where an educated person will say “Well, no, cranking up the Earth’s temperature by 2 degrees Celsius is not a problem at all. Let’s go and melt to Antarctic ice sheet and flood Los Angeles, Miami and New York. Go right ahead.”

That would be the essence of saying No as an answer to this question.

 

 

Visualizing the Reach of Humanity in Space

On By Norbert HauptIn Astronomy, Science, Visualizing3 Comments

There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, most of them millions of light years apart from each other. Our own galaxy is the Milky Way. Of course, we’re living inside of it, so we cannot ever take a picture of it. The picture below is of another galaxy (Andromeda) that we think is similar to our own. But that’s close enough for this exercise in visualization. You can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Milky Way 1 The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter. That means that the light takes 100,000 years to go from one edge of it to the other.  Our own sun is in a minor spiral arm, called the Orion arm, about 28,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way. That means it’s a little over halfway out from the inside. Milky Way 2 In the picture above I marked a random spot. Let’s just say that’s about 28,000 light years from the center. If you enlarge the picture, you’ll see a little circle at the end of the arrow. That’s approximately the bubble where all the stars we can see with our naked eye on Earth are located. If you go outside right now, every star you see is actually in this little red circle. That’s how far we can see. That’s the “approximately 1,000 light year bubble.” Milky Way 3 About 1930, when radio became popular, we started broadcasting. Our radio waves of Churchill speeches or Hitler diatribes started leaving the earth at that time. Since then, of course, we added Gilligan’s Island and I Love Lucy over the years, bringing us to Family Ties, Seinfeld and finally Breaking Bad. There is a bubble of radio waves that started leaving the Earth around 1930 in all directions. That bubble is now 170 light years in diameter and growing every second. That bubble represents the entire reach of technological humanity into our universe. In the above picture, I tried to put that bubble of 170 light years in perspective, and I found it’s just a tiny little dot. If you zoom in on the picture above and look at the little red dot at the end of the arrow, that’s about how far humanity’s “scream” into the world has reached, at the speed of light. It will take a while before the scream reaches any listeners anywhere – and they’d better not blink, lest they miss us entirely.

A Rock from Mars

On By Norbert HauptIn Astronomy, Nature, Need to Know, ScienceLeave a comment

image_2153_1-Nakhla-meteorite
[image credit: NASA]
A rock formed on Mars 1.38 billion years ago. About 11 million years ago, an impact event on Mars ejected this rock from the Martian surface. It then circled the sun along with Mars and Earth for 11 million years. On June 28, 1911, it “rained” down to Earth along with a number of other meteorites near El-Nakhla in Egypt. The meteorites are now called the Nakhla meteorites.

I was born some 45 years after it crashed and was collected, and I now get to marvel about it. The simple fact that we even know this, and can establish this much detail about the history of this one rock is fascinating.

Dust in the wind, we are.

 

Multiple fragments of the Nakhla meteorite fell to Earth on June 28, 1911 near the village of El-Nakhla in Egypt. Its crystallization age has been determined to be 1.38 billion years.

About 11 million years ago, an impact event ejected this rock from the Martian surface, after which it traveled through space and crashed into our planet in 1911.

Size and Distance of the Moon

On By Norbert HauptIn Science2 Comments

Here is a picture of the United States superimposed on our moon. This shows that if I fly from San Diego to New York, I pretty much fly the distance of the diameter of the moon.

Size of Moon
[click for picture credit]
But it helps looking at the real size and distance. This image is to scale. Click to enlarge.

Distance of Moon

Here is what it would look like if Jupiter were as far away from us as our moon:

Jupiter at Moon

The picture above is lifted from the YouTube below – for credit.

Finally, you could stack all the other planets between the Earth and the Moon, and still have room to spare:

distance-to-moon-with-planets1-1024x576
[click for picture credit: http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com]

What Really Matters – Speed is Relative

On By Norbert HauptIn Science1 Comment

With all our blind fury and anger at the world coming apart, about religious zealotry going crazy and scaring the shit out of us, I like to come back down to earth and think about some of the bigger wonders in the world, like the speed of things.

To muse about that, I posted in March 2013 about my coffee cup. Here is a link in case you missed it.

Speed is relative. Here is a chart I have put together to illustrate that:

Speed is Relative

There are a number of entries in this chart that I find counter-intuitive.

The very fastest rifle bullet is still only a fraction of the orbital speed of the International Space Station and the astronauts floating in it.

Any point on the surface of the earth at the equator moves about twice as fast as you do when you travel in a 747 across the ocean.

That point on the equator moves faster than the speed of sound.

The earth zooms around the sun four times faster than the orbital speed of the space station.

The Andromeda Galaxy is racing toward us about four times as fast as the earth is zipping around the sun or almost 80 times as fast as the fastest rifle bullet. But don’t worry, we won’t collide for a while yet.

And then, our galaxy is hurtling along within the “local group” of galaxies at a speed about ten times as fast as the Andromeda is coming at us, moving at about on third of one percent of the speed of light.

And all this is going on, while I am sitting here with my coffee cup, moving along for the ride in the “local group”.

Who knows how fast the universe itself is moving, and where to?

 

Colliding with Andromeda

On By Norbert HauptIn Science2 Comments

Andromeda by Pacholka
Andromeda Galaxy by Wally Pacholka [click for full picture credit]
The Andromeda Galaxy is visible in the picture above as photographed by Wally Pacholka in Bryce Canyon. Andromeda is the bright smudge in the right lower side of the sky. It’s actually very hard to see with the naked eye, but the disk is three degrees wide on the sky, six times as wide as the full moon. To get a good look at it, you need a good set of binoculars or a telescope.

Or you can look at one of the many pictures available online:

Andromeda
Andromeda Galaxy from Earth

Andromeda is the nearest large galaxy to our Milky Way. It is about 2 million light years away and it is a spiral galaxy not dissimilar to our own. Our Milky Way would look a lot like this to a viewer from the Andromeda Galaxy. Andromeda is larger than the Milky Way. We estimate that it contains about 1 trillion stars, versus “only” 300 billion in the Milky Way.

Scientists have discovered that the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are on a collision course, approaching each other at a speed of 245,000 miles per hour. This means that every hour the Andromeda Galaxy hurtles our way by more than the distance of the Moon from the Earth. At that rate, the two galaxies will “collide” about 4 billion years from now.

Andromeda Collision
Collision of Andromeda and Milky Way [Picture Credit: NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger]
Here is an artist’s conception of what the Earth’s night sky will look like then. On the left you see the Andromeda filling up pretty much the entire sky. On the right is the Milky Way, already being distorted.

Would we get hit? If the Sun were the size of a ping pong ball, the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, would be a pea about 680 miles away. That’s how “densely packed” our galaxy is with stars. So even though billions of stars would race past each other at a speed of 245,000 miles per hour, statistically none will collide, but the gravitational forces will wreak havoc to their paths and the two galaxies will merge to become one super galaxy.

Too bad we can’t be around to see this. But then again, if there were viewers here at that time, what we see in the picture above would be their normal daily night sky, unchanged and apparently unmoving for many millions of years.

There won’t be any humans around then. The sun will have expanded and burned the Earth to a lifeless cinder crisp. Earth will be a dead rock circling that huge red sun none of us would recognize as our own.

It will be other civilizations, other beings alive then, on other planets near other stars, that will have the privilege of this view.