Space News

China, Russia and Japan Fight Over Moon

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Despite sending yet another teacher into space, the US has been asleep at the wheel when it comes to the latest space race. I am not surprized. We want to live it up here at home, not spend energy and time jostling with Japan, China and Russia in conquering space. Unbeknownst to us, there is actually a hot space race and what is at stake is the moon, the satellite we conquered and then abandoned during the Vietnam War. Now we concentrate on building our castle of sand in the form of debts to the nations that are now racing to secure the moon's resources. This is beyond stupid. We want to steal oil here on earth from angry Muslims while there is no bin Laden on the moon, is there?

From the Times:

With Asia's biggest powers set to launch their first unmanned lunar missions — possibly as early as next month — the countdown has begun in the hottest space race since the United States beat the Soviet Union to the moon nearly four decades ago.

Japan's space agency said last week that its SELENE lunar satellite is on track for a Sept. 13 launch, following years of delay as engineers struggled to fix mechanical problems. China, meanwhile, is rumored to be planning a September blastoff for its Chang'e 1 probe, but is coy as to the date.

The Chinese satellite and its Changzheng 3 rocket have passed all tests, and construction of the launch pad is finished, according to the National Space Administration's Web site. Last month, China's minister of defense technology told CCTV that all was ready for a launch "by the end of the year."

Secure in the knowledge the US can't contest anyone, stuck at a low LaGrange orbit with the ricketty space shuttle, all our trade rivals plan for the far future as we refuse to look even at the near future. Both China and Japan can spend up to a trillion dollars, conquering the moon. We have to beg for handouts to go to a low L-3 orbit. This annoys me no end. The entire reason for building space stations was to hone the skills to built L-5 orbiting way-stations that could transmit humans and materials back and forth between the earth and the moon and thus, head out to other planetary and even interstellar (I admit intergalactic was pushing things a bit) exploration and colonization. So long as we cling to our beloved Earth, we are doomed for the old sun is part of a former star cluster born not too long after the Big Bang and the sun's steady-state date is already past due.

We must move outwards if we want to spread the love. On the other hand, maybe confining us here is a better option as far as the universe is concerned! But being an optimist, I hope to reach outwards and colonize other planets especially since there are billions of planets out there just waiting to be visited and...we are nasty, aren't we. Long ago, I said at one of the first World Cons, 'We are the space aliens who are invading all those people living in Barstow, California.' Incidentally, where most of the mid-1950's SF movies were shot and a stomping ground of my own misspent youth.

I used to ask my dad, why space aliens didn't kidnap me. He would say, 'The KGB won't even kidnap you. Forget aliens.' I even asked a KGB agent this in 1968 and all he did was laugh. Hahaha. Tovarichii! Bah.

When I was a child, I wanted to travel to other star systems and play the alien from outerspace. I hoped to find a planet of cats like Felix the Cat. In the fifties, he lived in an observatory with the annoying clone of myself, Pointdexter. And Master Cylinder would try to destroy him. I once dated the Master in the Tom Baker series of Dr. Who TV shows on the BBC. He was way cool. And very gay. Another broken heart here.

But to continue: The space race is here! And we are going to Mars as soon as the Chinese give us enough loans and since this isn't happening, Bush is, as he told Howard in Australia, 'Kicking ass in Iraq' which is why a bunch of American soldiers were blown up there today. The asses being kicked to hell and beyond aren't Bush's. He would make a great bad guy who chickens out and sells the heroine off to the alien overlords so he could have some small reward. It still annoys me that the Master of Dr. Who was gay. And had to discover this while hanging out with me. I suppose it is all my fault. I told my dad, 'All alien invaders will meet me and change their sex and I will remain unsatified and annoyed.' As it is, sex and space have a funny relationship as that strange story of the astronaut chasing after a rival over a man who wasn't gay though I wonder if he changed his mind and wants to marry Senator Craig!

All together now: Pegasus doesn't care who humps whom. So long as there is an orgy and apples, he is happy. He, personally, prefers mares. Nightmares, to be exact. They are a great delight for him and an annoyance to myself. I dislike them a lot.

The race to the moon is serious. I joke but this is a serious matter. The universe is filled with things we can colonize. Or steal. And little of it is guarded. For example, the American space race showed clearly, no one is attending to the moon so we can take whatever we find there. More than just a handful of space rocks! We have no idea what is on Venus that we can mine but if it has half of the mineral wealth and diamonds and gold as the earth itself, well, 'Eureka!' Venus is similar to hell but no matter. We mine under hellish conditions here on earth. The Chinese will mine Venus.

From the International Herald Tribune:

Russia will hold firm in its opposition to deployment of U.S. missile defenses in Eastern Europe and in its insistence that Kosovo's status be resolved to Serbia's satisfaction, the foreign minister said Monday.

"Our partners should understand that we don't bargain," the minister, Sergey Lavrov, told students at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, a top school for training diplomats.

"It should be understood that, for all the nonconfrontational external policy of Russia, there are so-called 'red lines' for us - this is when there is a real threat to our national security or to the existing order of international rights," he said.

I keep saying this: Russia has a long history of being suddenly invaded by allies. People sign treaties and then invade. Aside from Iran, few countries have the right to claim to paranoia than Russia. Over and over again, this happens. To this day, the US talks about sneak attacks on Russia. This is beyond stupid. If we want to contest rule fo the earth with Russia, we better rebuild our space program and stop fighting Iranian cats.

I always assumed the nearset habitable planet with intelligent life will be cats. Irresponsible, self-centered, proud and easily annoyed, they will happily respond to worship, petting and service such as sacrifices and lots of delicate goodies. I practice my interstellar diplomatic skills on my collection of cats. God help us if the alien planet is populated with creatures like my horse, Sparky.

So all explorations should include live lab rats and mice as well as a big bag of Macintosh apples. Just in case. If we meet aliens like dogs, all we need is a bag of bones. And a whistle. And a few balls. Just don't visit them after visiting the cat aliens. Or we will be in the middle of an interstellar war that would dwarf the battles over the Holy Land here.

From Xinhua:

Russia will send astronauts to Moon by 2025 and establish a permanent station on it in 2028-2032, a senior official said here on Friday.

Russia, which sent the first cosmonaut to the space in 1961, has forged a long-range blueprint for its space industry up to 2040, said Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos).

"According to our assessments, the manned flight to the Moon will be prepared by 2025, while a permanent station will be created on the Moon's surface in 2028-2032," Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

By 2028, Europe will be broke, Russia will be rich, the US will be history and China will be teaching us the fine art of brush painting their strange language. Maybe the Russians will let me explain interstellar diplomacy. Not that they believe in anything but might makes right. Until they meet the inevitable Insterstellar Space Cats looking for Iran Kitty.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Two Trains With NASA Rocket Parts Crash

Elaine Meinel Supkis

NASA's slow degeneration continues. It clearly shows how our 'public' systems are collapsing. Two separate trains carrying space shuttle parts from Utah to Florida derailed. One was going only 20 mph and it fell off the tracks, the other was a bridge collapse. This is so stupid. Both happened where the USA is flat as a pancake. While China builds high-tech rail service, ours continues to rot to hell. We waste our wealth rebuilding over and over, Iraq, while the USA falls apart.

From Associated Press:

A freight train carrying segments of the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters derailed Wednesday after a bridge collapsed, authorities said. Six people aboard the train were reported injured.

NASA said it was not immediately known whether the equipment was damaged. But space agency spokesman Allard Beutel in Washington said the accident should not delay any shuttle launches.

The cause of the bridge collapse was under investigation.

For political reasons, they scattered the building of the shuttle all over kingdom come. The savings of the space shuttle via reusable parts became a total farce right off the bat. The logic of present systems whereby the cost and energy used to cart things hither and yon don't matter is a lie. It matters a lot. The fact that the larger space shuttle parts must move by train and that Congress and industry have joined forces in neglecting or actively destroying our rail systems means frequent train accidents like the ones that are plaguing NASA this month.

NASA spokesman Kyle Herring said the segments were not scheduled for use during the next shuttle flight, the liftoff of Atlantis on June 8, but for missions in October and December. NASA's solid rocket boosters and their parts are freely interchangeable.

It was the second time in less than a week that the train jumped the tracks while carrying the booster segments across the country from the manufacturer, ATK Launch Systems Group of Promontory, Utah, to Cape Canaveral, Fla., Herring said.

Last Friday, two axles on one car came off the tracks for unknown reasons about 60 miles west of Salina, Kan., while the train was traveling at less than 20 mph, Herring said. The train was back on the tracks after several hours, the spokesman said.

I love trains and have ridden in a wide variety of trains across the planet. I have watched our train system decline over the course of my own life from the 1950's to today. What a joke, going only 20 mph in the flattest state in America and the wheels fall off? Gads. Over time, train tracks degrade. The bed shifts, the rails get twisted by the freeze/thaw cycle pulling them in various directions, etc. The condition of America's rail systems is disgusting.

I sit above some of the rail systems here in Albany and watch rusty, rotted, rattle-trap trains roll past, they look like they have been eaten by a whale and reguritated. Covered with graffiti, dirty and forelorn, they look like some third world gadget.

From the official Amtrack forums:

Post #8 Conductor

Group: Members
Posts: 840
Joined: 18-February 03
From: South NJ
Member No.: 102

I think the perception that railroad derailments are occurring more frequently now than in the past is more due to the wider knowledge of the incidents than the actual rate. Rail accidents are occurring at the lowest rate in history, with the rate being about 60% lower than 20 years ago. The big change is that today every rail fan with a computer knows about every derailment, big and small, within hours. Many of these are relatively minor and in the pre-internet days would have been a non-event outside the immediate area. But today, if a few cars hit the ground in west Texas, those of us in New Jersey know about it before the wrecking crews are on site.

And, if you want to incite a riot, suggest to the freight railroads that they should lobby for federal aid. The reason that the RR lobby has not obtained direct federal aid for rail maintenance is because they have not asked for it and do not want it. Every dollar of federal aid comes with terms and conditions that the RR’s find unacceptable. The big one is open access. Federal money would almost certainly bring a demand that the railroads, in exchange for accepting general tax funds, open their tracks to every Tom, Dick, and UPS that wants to just run trains. That is the number one fear of the railroads today and they want no part of anything that even remotely could lead to open access. There was a proposal earlier this year in Congress to establish a railroad trust fund similar to the trust funds now used for highways (gas tax) and airports and airways (ticket and fuel taxes). For this fund, a tax would be levied on fuel and freight. The railroads killed it before you could say boo.

The rail system has been sold off to various enterprises which are merrily running them into the ground. Killing the system makes money. Fixing nothing makes money. So what if a train carrying poisonous chemicals derails in the middle of Baltimore, forcing the evacuation of thousands? So what if a toxic load is lost in Texas? Or a train burns? The people simply have to move away until they may return to the mess.

Running slow freight and even slower passenger trains means more money for the guys milking this dying beast. And America stands ALONE of all industrialized nations, ruining their rail system like this! It is too disgusting: during wars and insurrections, people like Lawrence of Arabia, for example, risk their necks to detrail trains and wreck tracks.

Here in America, our executives are the terrorists.

From Forbes:

As Beijing scrambles to expand the country's rail systems, Canada's Bombardier emerges as a likely winner.

In a cavernous train factory outside the coastal city of Qingdao, China, a dozen workers clad in navy blue uniforms attach air-conditioning ducts to the roof of a high-speed train car. Nearby, four men weld a roof to the body of a car, the silence pierced by the loud bangs of the welding gun.

The 1,500 employees at Bombardier Sifang Power (Qingdao) Transportation Ltd.--a venture led by Canadian railway powerhouse Bombardier, are on the front lines of the biggest rail boom China has seen. In a five-year plan ending in 2010 the Chinese government is shelling out $161 billion (1.25 trillion yuan) to lay new tracks and acquire equipment to expand the rail system. It is spending an additional $32 billion on rolling stock and locomotives.

Bombardier Transportation, with $6.6 billion in revenues the largest rail equipment company in the world, has had a long business relationship with China. It has inked nearly 40 contracts with the country over the past two decades. It was the first multinational train builder to set up a joint venture in China, in 1996--one of three the company now has there. In two and a half years Bombardier has signed Chinese contracts that will reap it $1.5 billion, with hopes of more to come.

In New York, we used to get our trains from Canada. Then they wanted an American facility building trains. But outside of New York, who else cares? China is building high-speed, high-tech train service from Tibet over to Hong Kong. They want to be able to move millions of tons of supplies and troops swiftly. The USA thinks we don't need a working train system. We will use expensive, gas guzzling trucks to move everything.

But if there is a war, forget about that! Just like we moved all our bases out of America and over to where snipers and bombers can kill us and wreck everything, so it is with our transportation: it is being destroyed because we think we don't need it. But moving stuff from China swiftly to various box stores that are spread out evenly isn't what we need if there were a war. Namely, we would need to concentrate troops and materials, not scatter them! And so our systems break down while Europe and Asia go the opposite direction.

And the irony that our laggard space program that professes to want to go to Mars, of all things, can't assemble the wretched remains of our Shuttle program because it can't shuttle simple materials from point A to depot B!

Culture of Life News Main Page

NASA Is Falling Apart Rapidly

Elaine Meinel Supkis

NASA is lost in space. The Mars mission maniacs still believe they will jet for the stars but realistic people can see the writing on the walls: we are going bankrupt and because of spending a trillion dollars trying to secure the oil in Iraq, we have no more money for space cadets. Everything is falling apart.

From the BBC:

At a time when climate change impacts are accelerating, our ability to observe those impacts from space is deteriorating.

Cuts in US government funding for Nasa programmes will dramatically weaken scientists' capacity to monitor and understand the planet's climate; at least, so says a major study from the National Research Council (NRC), published earlier this year.

If present trends continue, they conclude, by 2015 the number of US Earth-observing satellite missions will be reduced by half, putting the scientific systems they support "at risk of collapse".

This ticks me off. Mars is a geologically crippled planet with barely anything happening due to it losing most of its water and atmosphere over the eons. No more volcanoes erupt. There is a spring and winter still but it can't even cook up a small rainstorm, just sand storms and dust devils. I bet it doesn't even have earthquakes.

But this planet is the most special one in the universe, it is extremely dynamic on every level all the way to the active core. It is tremendously complex and we still know so very little. Looking at the earth from above means being able to see the larger picture and this is very important for us creatures living here on the uncertain and ever-changing surface. Just like watching that interesting old star, the sun, is life and death.

But because Bush and his doomsday cult creeps hate this earth and view it as a place to rape and pillage for their own lusts, they are uninterested in looking at it from afar and protecting it from the many dangers that lurk out there in space. Bush doesn't care about Mars, either. He needed those fools in the the Space Exploration community to help him take power and in return, they get to play children's games, pretending they are Darth Vader.

The real beneficiaries of government largess has been the doomsday cultists building various missile weapons systems that will enable us to launch WWIII. These people are also building huge bomb shelters in hidden places at taxpayer expense. They believe the way to protect this planet is to blow up as many humans as possible so the Master Race survives and runs the joint using superior technology.

These people infest all levels of the government. They are extremely dangerous. Note how this spring, they have been busy ramming their missiles down Europe's throats, egging on the Russians and daring them to meet us, missile to missle.

A stupid mistake since China is Russia's closest ally and Germany has been placating Russia since 1982. Both don't want WWIII. Not that the doomsdayers care.

From Florida Today:

Congressional investigators questioned NASA's top attorney behind closed doors Friday about his role in destroying copies of a recorded meeting between the NASA administrator and the agency's watchdog office.

Michael Wholley approved the action, NASA acknowledged Friday. The recordings were of an April 10 meeting called to discuss an integrity report. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin did not want the gathering recorded because he wanted employees to feel free to talk, agency spokesman David Mould said.

The Democrats have been investigating all sorts of things and this matter has gotten press coverage but it is the tip of the iceberg. Bush has put into positions of responsiblity, an army of 'Brownies' whose sole function is to gum up the works and hinder scientists studying this planet. They don't want the condition of this planet to make the news and motivate people to stop the rapine and destruction of it. Also, they want people to hate this planet and not care if it is blown up and made toxic via nuclear bombs.

From ABC:

Three key members of Congress called for the removal Monday of NASA's inspector general, saying he abused his authority, was too chummy with NASA leaders and created a "hostile" workplace in the auditing office.

The call for the dismissal of NASA Inspector General Robert Cobb came after the lawmakers received a report on Cobb's conduct from the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which has been investigating complaints about Cobb dating back to 2005.

The entire government is filled with such people as Cobb. He was there to work with Griffin to destroy the life sciences and the teams of scientists working on earth projects. He also was there to keep the money flowing to the corporations that make stuff for NASA and which are all Bush Pioneers, paying him bribes to keep the money flowing.

And they make little money off of science satellites, their milch kuh is the Space Shuttle. This white elephant herd of clumsy space vehicles is growing smaller and smaller via blowing up and killing everyone. There are no more shuttles being built and the ones being used are very old with ancient computers from the Atari era and the dream of many launches every year dwindled from day one to hair-raising rarity.

Homer Hickam,
Friday, August 29, 2003:

Take a look at the Shuttle stack and what do you see? A fragile spaceplane sitting on the back of a huge propellant tank between two massive solid rocket boosters. The tank holds liquid oxygen and hydrogen and towers above the spaceplane. It is the foam off this tank that hit Columbia and knocked a hole in her wing. But why is there foam at all? Because without it, ice would form on the super-cooled tank and hit the spaceplane. But why would ice or foam hit it in the first place? Because of where the spaceplane sits. But why does it sit there? Because the Shuttle Main Engines (SME's) need to come back to Earth and therefore must be attached to the spaceplane to be returned. And why do the SME's need to be returned? So that they can be reused. And why do they have to be reused? Because, theoretically, it's cheaper to refurbish them than build new ones. Therefore, the spaceplane we think of as the Shuttle has to sit right in the middle of all the turmoil of launch because we once believed it would be cheaper to bring back those engines and rebuild them than to build new ones. That has not proved to be the case-far from it-but it has left us with a crew sitting in the most vulnerable position possible in terms of engineering design and safety. Simply put, had that spaceplane been on top of the stack, the destruction of Columbia would not have occurred because its wings would have been out of the line of fire. Challenger would probably not have happened, either. Had the spaceplane been above the explosion, it likely would have been able to punch out and glide back home.

Despite the latest disaster, NASA kept on launching the shuttle but reduced it to only once a month or less. But even this has proven to be impossible and it has now been many months since the last one was supposed to go. Meanwhile, the staff working on or for the Space Shuttle is falling apart and ending up in the news. Kidnapping, suicide-murders and simple depression plagues NASA. Instead of feeling like they are forging ahead into the future, they are flying backwards into the past.

This sense of losing ground has demoralized the staff and in the Jet Propulsion Lab and science community, the astronomers and biologists and geologists using the stream of intensely interesting data pouring in---they are all filled with fury and frustration because they can see their 'eyes' in space shutting down as old satellites degrade. They need to keep these programs going and extend them.

By Gregg Easterbrook April 1980

NASA longed to abandon the familiar one-shot rocket-whose stages, once fired, went tumbling into the sea or burned up, taking their titanium castings and navigational computers with them. The Saturn V moon rocket, for example, weighed 3,050 tons at blast-off, and you got exactly seven tons back--that dinky little "command module" the men rode in. "We wanted to have only miniscule involvement with the rocket concept in the future," Day says.

At first NASA asked for an all-reusable shuttle. Grumman and McDonnell-Douglas came up with a plan that called for two huge winged ships, each with its own pilots and engines, mated piggyback. They would blast off together, with the larger ship-the booster-spitting fire for the first 10 to 20 miles of altitude. Then, fuel spent, it would circle back to land like an airplane. The smaller ship would continue into orbit, drop its cargo, reenter the atmosphere, and also land like a plane: NASA believed this system would be economical to operate, but would cost $10 billion to build. The Office of Management and Budget balked. Ten billion, it gasped--out of the question!

What could you do, OMB asked, for $5 billion? Design of the horse was referred to committee, where a compromise was found. A partially reusable shuttle was conceived.

I remember the negotiations over the Space Shuttle. It so happened, this was also when we were in trouble with paying for both the Vietnam war and the USA hit the Hubbert Oil Peak, the first nation to do so. Inflation was beginning to rage as world oil prices shot up due to wars in the Middle East. Inflation at home began to rage. The USA has to try to sell the idea of space exploration to a worried Congress that felt back then, they had to balance the budget.

Since then, balancing the budget has become old hat and only one year since, under Clinton, has it been anywhere near balanced, often it runs deep in the red and since Bush took over, very deep in the red as it ignores reality. NASA thought it could ignore reality just like the Pentagon but they now realize they are Bush's enemies and he wants to destroy the scientists who are the backbone of NASA and the most important component.

The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped,Sunday, Feb. 02, 2003 By GREGG EASTERBROOK :

Any new space system that reduced costs would be, to the contractors, killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Just a few weeks ago, NASA canceled a program called the Space Launch Initiative, whose goal was to design a much cheaper and more reliable replacement for the shuttle. Along with the cancellation, NASA announced that the shuttle fleet would remain in operation until 2020, meaning that Columbia was supposed to continue flying into outer space even when its airframe was more than 40 years old! True, B-52s have flown as long. But they don't endure three times the force of gravity on takeoff and 2000*none on re-entry.

The space station is a failed experiment. We really don't know what to do with it. I would say, it was conceived of too small and too petty. Either go for it all the way or don't do it at all, in this case. Building space colonies means cutting the Pentagon's budget by 2/3rds and committing vast resources. But this is not politically possible. So the entire idea should have been canned.

I want a host of probes sent throughout this solar system as well as probes seeking a way of looking at our solar system from above the galactic plane. This concept is nearly impossible for our present abilities but it must be done because we have to 'see' what the heck is going on up there. As well as sending probes to that dark area just outside of the sun's windstream: that place where those comets and meteorites come out of with so little warning.

From Australia, The Age:

With only three years remaining before the space-shuttle fleet's planned retirement, NASA managers have begun tackling the thorny issues that will dictate the program's end.

Critical facilities must be overhauled to support planned human missions to the moon. Billions of dollars' worth of obsolete shuttle hardware must be disposed of.

And, most difficult of all, thousands of jobs must be shifted or eliminated as the shuttle era ends and the new Constellation project takes off.

Shutting down the Shuttle program irritates many Congress critters as well as being a sore point for anyone running for office. It is a big money maker soaking up tax dollars and like the many Pentagon programs, was scattered about the nation so all of Congress would want to keep it going. Of course, the fact that there are barely any shuttles left and they are viewed increasingly as a terrifying prospect when they are launched, this is demoralizing not just NASA but the entire USA which cringes when launches occur.

And I remember a similar period back in the 1950's: Russia's rockets were beating our own and this upset everyone for we were losing the space race. But the Soviet state got bogged down in trying to keep Eastern Europe, parts of Russia itself and Afghanistan under the Soviet boot heels and this cost a lot of money and created massive bad will that grew greater by the day and financing this tyranny was making it harder and harder for Russia to have any sort of space program.

And here we are, imitating them! Closing our borders to professors and intellectuals, hindering and harrassing scientists and creative people, spending a fortune trying to keep a grip on our vast empire, running deep in the red, debasing our currency, destroying our entire industrial base. And we want to conquer space?

We can't even walk in daylight in many of our inner cities! We are fearful of ourselves as mass murderers run riot even in the halls of NASA! Spying on each other and the entire planet uses up precious satellites and resources rather than looking outwards at the rest of creation!

We are as doomed as the Soviets.

Culture of Life News Main Page

The 62 Million Year Extinction Cycle Explained

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Astronomers detect a 62 million year cycle whereby the earth, instead of being part of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, actually moves on a different plane entirely, I have talked about this in the past in several articles: the sun isn't native to this galaxy but rather, was born within a small 'hobbit' star cluster/galaxy which was captured by the bigger galaxy and we go through vast changes in our stellar environment as our sun moves through various parts of the galactic plane.

From National Geographic:

Mikhail Medvedev and Adrian Melott, both of the University of Kansas, presented their new theory at a meeting of the American Physical Society earlier this month.

The theory offers the first explanation for a mysterious pattern previously noted in the fossil record.

"There are 62-million-year ups and downs in the number of marine animals over the last 550 million years," Melott said.

One of the wonders of Nature is how things like to cycle. Cycling isn't straightforwards, it usually means circular motion or waves or things making waves by moving in circles, etc. If the movements of galaxies through time and space could be seen as if they are snakes moving across sand dunes, for example, we could then trace their paths. But of course, we cannot. We can only try to figure out from what we see to day, what happened in the past.

We can now plainly see thanks to modern optics, galaxies are sucked into each other's orbs and they merge quite violently. And 'active' galaxies are filled with very hot, white stars. We can see some really spectacular fireworks within some of our neighboring galaxies. The nearer to the source of these crashes, the hotter and brighter the stars. Our own star isn't hot and white, it is a yellow star and thus, has a long life.

Looking at other galaxies, I can only say, we are so fortunate that our little star has been captured by a galaxy that has only sucked in very small mini-galaxies and is not participating in one of those epic mass-collisions we see all around us.

From the National Geographic:

The Kansas researchers discovered that high rates of extinction in the cycle coincide almost perfectly with periodic "excursions" of the solar system outside the central plane of the Milky Way galaxy.

"Excursions to galactic north coincide with drops in biodiversity," Melott said.

During these periods, which include some of the largest mass extinctions known from the fossil record, Earth is bombarded with high levels of cosmic radiation.

Funny, that. Do all the hot, white stars take little strolls away from the general gravitational pool? I doubt this. We now can see that when various mini-galaxies or dwarf and hobbit galaxies fall into the gravitational grip of a big galaxy, they usually get stretched out with the family of stars losing contact with each other but since they fall in from all sorts of directions, they can even have polar orbits vis a vis the greater galaxy!

Our orbital plane is at a diagonal. Everything is somewhat cock-eyed vis a vis all the stars forming out of the interstellar dust and dirt that seems to be flowing in from all over the place. This dirty black stuff which doesn't emit light cloaks our galaxy so we barely can see any of the bright stars forming out of this mucky mess. The brutally bright core of this galaxy is nearly totally hidden from view or night would be as bright as day!

Since we are slowly being drawn into this galaxy and since it is also dragging in lots of dirt, as our little star, the Sun, rotates on its older path, it moves in and out of bands of space junk. These periods can be quite hazardous.

Our solar system travels through the disk-shaped Milky Way on a complicated circuit that takes about 225 million years to complete. At regular intervals, the system's wanderings take it up and down through the thin central portion of the disk. The sun reaches its farthest distance from the central plane every 62 million years.

The entire galactic disk, meanwhile, is hurtling through the hot gas that surrounds it at about 125 miles (200 kilometers) a second.

Wait! Wait! Is the Universe filled with 'hot gas'? Or are we in hot gas because we are part of a group of galaxies called 'the Local Group' (I love these utilitarian names!)? And the Great Attractor is attracting all this gas, right? And we are moving through it and not moving with it? What is this?

Looking at motion we have to remember our galaxy is rotating. In a circle. Like down a drain-type circle. In addition, we are moving towards the Great Attractor. Which I am assuming is rotating and moving probably in a circle, too. A big, big circle, of course. Anyway, our earth has been circling this star called the sun and it has been probably part of a small star cluster or mini-dwarf-hobbit galaxy and now we are trying to circle the Milky Way and we are off base because we are foreigners.

When the concept of a 'Hobbit' galaxy was suggested in January, I wrote a lot about this:

Life on our earth evolved in only 1 billion years. What if one of the companion yellow suns in our hobbit galaxy evolved life 3 billion years ago? Then they would have been the creatures who watched apprehensively as this quiet, peaceful group of old stars fell into the Milky Way and were torn from each other and exposed to vast explosions and disasters. Somehow, our own planet managed to survive. Occassionally, infalling material from that time passes by like we are seeing this week, zipping around the sun.

From Xinhua:

Seven of the new galaxies are gravitationally bound to the Milky Way, while the eighth appears to float freely in space.

The new Local Group members are even smaller and fainter than other known dwarf galaxies, with luminosities ranging from only a thousand to at most a few hundred thousand times that of our sun.

The dimness could be the result of stellar age, as seven of the new galaxies contain mostly old stars. Of these seven, two are located in the constellation Canes Venatici, one in Bootes, one in Leo, one in Coma Berenices, one in Ursa Major and one in Hercules.

Our eccentric orbit of this galaxy can't have gone on so close to the Orion Arm for 5 billion years. We would be much closer to the center by now if our sun formed while part of the Orion Arm. Since we glide up and down due to the spiral effect of our passage through space relative to the flatter plane of the Milky Way, note that few if any hot white stars get to have eccentric wanderings!---we go in and out of lots of different levels of density and gases of various sorts.

Probably our sun flared into existence out of the little galaxy it belonged to when the smaller galaxy began to suffer tidal pulls from the looming Milky Way. I bet that 5 billion years ago, if there were astronomers on this planet, they would have had a most spectacular view of this huge galaxy seen from a 32 degree angle!

Indeed, wouldn't it be logical that our sun hasn't always been in the Orion arm but has been in various other places vis a vis the rest of this galactic system? We don't know! Just like it took a long time for people to emotionally accept the idea that the earth went around the sun, so it is with our sun; it goes around the galaxy in an erratic way because it is alien.

From Rob Gendler Astropics:

A description of our local region within the Milky Way would not be complete without a mention of Gould's Belt. In 1879 the astronomer Benjamin Gould reported his survey of the distribution of bright stars in the local Milky Way. Gould's work showed that a true local subsystem of young stars and gas existed in a rotating flat disk inclined some 20 degrees to the proper disk of the Milky Way. The disk extends some 2000 light years across and contains some of the most famous astronomical objects including the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula and Horsehead regions, the California Nebula, the Coal Sack and the Rho Ophiuchus clouds near Antares. Gould's Belt must be a young structure between 30 and 40 million years old by virtue of the young stars it contains but its origins are still unclear. One theory is that an errant supercloud collided with a major spiral arm of the Milky Way about 100 million years ago. The shock wave resulted in the process of braking and compression of the gas of the supercloud into a flat rotating disk. The older stars drifted out of the disk leaving the younger stars to form Gould's Belt.

This could be problematic: I will note that thinking of this as an 'arrant cloud' that happens to 'collide' with our massive galaxy is funny. Wherever this cloud was moving in the past, once it came within the jurisdiction of the gravitational pool of this rotating galaxy, it rotated into it just like all the other junk that has added onto this system. Our sun is not a hot star nor was it very near any of these which is why I am assuming there wasn't much hot gas with the mini-galaxy our sun belonged to so when it was captured by the Milky Way, the impact was minor. As it is, when stars blow up or we get exposed to the violence of the elements burning around the galactic clusters that are flying through space towards each other, the grip that living things have on this planet are weakened badly.

Here is another article I wrote about all this:

Um, 4 billion years ago, our sun was born in this 'errant supercloud'. Stars born in smaller galaxies form groups. How shall I put it? Galaxies minding their own business, breezing along their ARC in the cosmos, sail along with old stars, all pretty much stable yellow guys along with assorted amounts of gases and thingies we call 'dust' and 'comets' and whatevers. Junk. And this largish mass with a non-blackhole center, namely, not very intensely organized but still enough gravity to form stars of middling size like our own sun, when two galaxies finally get within each other's tidal surges, they light up like a Christmas tree!

In a now-classic 1974 paper, Richard Stothers and Jay Frogel ["The Local Complex of O and B Stars. I. Distribution of Stars and Interstellar Dust," R. Stothers and J. A. Frogel (1974), Astron. J., 79, 456.* -- WebEd.] mapped out the spatial extent of the belt. Using newly determined distances for B5 and hotter stars, they found two highly flattened stellar systems inclined by 19° – 22° to each other -- the underlying galactic field and Gould’s belt. Figure 1 below shows an edge-on view from within the galactic mid-plane. The dots represent stars of spectral type B5 and earlier (hotter). The Sun is at the intersection of the X and Z axes, and the galactic centre is well out of the view to the right, 8,500 parsecs (pc) distant. The intersection of these planes coincides almost exactly with the position of the Sun. Actually, the Sun is about 20 pc above the galactic plane, but is, within the errors, precisely in the plane of Gould’s belt. The stellar density decreases with distance from the Sun because stars at greater distances are less completely sampled.

Astronomers like to imagine that if we have an increase in cosmic rays, mutations speed up and this causes extinctions. And I say, this is silly. Evolution needs mutations! This is what makes it run! But the force that creates changes in life forms is environmental. If old niches suddenly disappear because the weather changes, many life forms collapse or go extinct. And many, many have over the eons. Today, the earth is covered with life forms although humans are trying to destroy this.

When major extinctions happen that depopulate huge parts of the earth, this means habitat niches have changed in ways that living things can't deal with through simple mutation. Namely, even the mutants die. This happens when things get very hot or very cold, very fast. Since our sun is the main force that runs our energy systems, a sudden flaring of the sun because of gravitational disturbances vis a vis the Galactic plane, just for example, can cause the planet to overheat. Since sea extinctions are cyclic, this means we are probably seeing the sun's surge in energy on a 62 million year cycle?

If the sun is hyper-active, this means it probably spits out x-rays and the solar wind would be terrific and this would do bad things to the ozone layer too. And so it isn't the mutations but the generaly destruction of the environment that would be the killer. Namely, only select, protected communities can survive and of them, many are mutants and thus, the older life forms don't show up exactly as they were before.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Sun Plays E Flat Music

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I finally go to listen to the 'music' of the sun and it sounded like just one monotonous note: E flat, I would guess, more or less. This reminded me of the huge black hole in the Perseus sector that plays B flat. So I thought it would be fun to have some music of the spheres here.

From the BBC:

Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun's atmosphere behave like a musical instrument, scientists say.

These "coronal loops" carry acoustic waves in much the same way that sound is carried through a pipe organ.

Solar explosions called micro-flares generate sound booms which are then propagated along the coronal loops.

Click here to listen to the roaring sounds.

I listened carefully and then went to the piano and tried to reproduce it. As I thought, it was sort of E flat to E major, namely, it has some depth to it, the vibrations are not as clear as a bell or a plucked string but more like the roar of a waterfall. Indeed, describing this irritating noise as 'music' was a big stretch or maybe it sounded like those ghetto boom boxes so beloved by tone deaf kids trying to blast the neighborhood but instead, blasted out their speakers.

From the BBC:

"These loops can be up to 100 million kilometres long and guide waves and oscillations in a similar way to a pipe organ," said Dr Youra Taroyan, from the Solar Physics and Space Plasma Research Centre (SP2RC) at the University of Sheffield.

The sound booms decay in less than an hour and dissipate in the very hot solar corona.

To make news, people have to kind of stretch the poetry a tad. And in this case, saying the sun's disturbances 'roar' would have a lot less impact than 'music like a church organ.' I looked up some other E flat information just for fun. So while reading this, we can listen to Beethoven's E flat Symphony #3

From Wikipedia:

E flat major is often associated with bold, heroic music, in part because of Beethoven's usage. His Eroica Symphony and his Emperor Concerto are both in this key.

Another reason is that it is a very good key for brass instruments (valveless 19th-century brass instruments specifically constructed to sound in this key were found to produce the most satisfying tone color). Thus, three of Mozart's completed horn concerti and Joseph Haydn's famous Trumpet Concerto are in E flat major, and so is Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony with its prominent horn theme in the first movement. Another famous heroic piece in the key of E flat major is Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life).

Listening to the sun heroically roaring was truly soul-lifting. The hero rises! Or rather, bellows into our ears. The sun's choice of pitch is also magical and inspirational.

From the Masons:

Such was the Masonic milieu when Wolfgang Mozart became a Master Mason.He must have been greatly moved and inspired by his experience. Almost immediately he composed his Freemason's Funeral Music and his music for the opening and closing of a Lodge. He now composed his opera, Don Giovanni, and his three great symphonies - the E flat, the G minor and the C major, as well as a great number of concertos and chamber-music works.

His last great opera, The Magic Flute, opened in Vienna on the evening of September 30, 1791. Mozart conducted the first two performances, when he was overtaken by his last illness. He lingered on while the opera had an unprecedented run of more than one hundred consecutive performances. It is said that in his sick bed, watch in hand, he would follow in imagination the performance of The Magic Flute in the theatre. Then he died after its 67th performance.

Well, so we now can worry about the sun being part of the Masonic conspiracy? Yes, they have the sun's rays on that pyramid with the eyeball on our dollar bills. The Japanese flag is the rising sun. Sunday is the day Christians go to Church! Sundaes are icecream dishes that make you very fat and are too tempting! Yes, this is leading to something big...

From NASA:

A truly enormous collection of thousands of galaxies, the Perseus Cluster - like other large galaxy clusters - is filled with hot, x-ray emitting gas. The x-ray hot gas (not the individual galaxies) appears in the left panel above, a false color image from the Chandra Observatory. The bright central source flanked by two dark cavities is the cluster's supermassive black hole. At right, the panel shows the x-ray image data specially processed to enhance contrasts and reveals a strikingly regular pattern of pressure waves rippling through the hot gas. In other words, sound waves, likely generated by bursts of activity from the black hole, are ringing through the Perseus Galaxy Cluster. Astronomers infer that these previously unknown sound waves are a source of energy which keeps the cluster gas so hot. So what note is the Perseus Cluster playing? Estimates of the distance between the wave peaks and sound speed in the cluster gas suggests the cosmic note is about 57 octaves below B-flat above middle C.

So, black holes are B flat. This sound is not noble, it is a 'splat' sound. Squish. Oozing in the lower registers, so deep in sound in this case, only creatures with special ears can hear it. Like elephants who make very deep noises far away from each other and we can't hear it nearly at all but their huge ears can and then there are whales who can hear very deep sounds from across the Pacific Ocean, watery pulsations.

From NPR:

During World War II, the New York Philharmonic was visiting the American Museum of Natural History. During rehearsal, somebody played a note that upset a resident live alligator named Oscar. Oscar, who'd been in the museum on 81st Street, suddenly began to bellow. Naturally, with so many scientists in residence, an experiment was quickly devised to see how to get Oscar to bellow again. Various musicians — string, percussive and brass — were brought to Oscar to play various notes. It turned out the culprit was B flat, one octave below middle C.

Alligators and probably Tyrannosaurus Rexes probably all love B flat. Probably they roar along because it is a love song to them or maybe a challenge to a duel. Certainly, I would not suggest going back in time and blowing a horn at B flat in the Jurassic era.

Click here to listen to an NPR story about a magical stairwell which harmonizes with B flat and echoes it for whole minutes after someone hums in B flat!

One big tuning fork! I would love to visit that place just to fool around. When we were young, we would go into the various observatories when no one was around to be bothered and would try to discover which pitches echoed the best. Naturally, we would yell, 'Pinnochio!' in these different pitches, being enamoured by the cartoon's whale. No wonder we would get ejected. Heh.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Water On Mars Is Much, Much Less Than Water On Earth

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As always, when new studies or probes show any moisture in the Martian ecosystem, everyone goes nuts imagining there must be life there. If there is, it would be vanishingly small in size. Time to think about our own planet's water and why we have a living planet unlike Mars.

The life on Mars dream lives on no matter how dim the prospects.

Reporter: Paula Kruger

MARK COLVIN: There's little in outer space that fires the imagination more than the possibility of life on Mars.

For life there needs to be water, and the latest news from NASA is that there is plenty of that.

A new radar that's measured ice deposits on Mars indicates that there's enough frozen water there to cover the entire planet to a depth of about 11 metres.

The find doesn't bring us any closer to knowing whether there was life on Mars, but it has revived the hopes of some that there could be life on the planet in the future, as Paula Kruger reports.

PAULA KRUGER: It has long been seen as the dry, dusty red planet.

But the latest discovery is pouring a lot of cold water, or, more correctly, ice on that belief.

Even when doing the simplest science news stories, they have to lie. For the last 30 years, everyone knew there was water on Mars. Heck, my grandfather, Edison Pettit, studied Mars for years on Mt. Wilson and other obvervatories and they knew all that time, the poles had water of some sort and he was asked by Lowell to map the canals on Mars.

Which proved to be illusions. We know a great deal more about the planet 100 years later but the fantasy that this place which is very dry, but at least wetter than the nearly 100% (at the very least) dry moon, could be habitable is hard to avoid.

Indeed, NASA's mission for the future is being warped badly by this dream. Last week, Congress asked NASA why they aren't even bothering to map the very, very dangerous asteroids and other celestial hazards and they said they have no money for this sort of thing. Protecting us from total annihilation is taking the back seat to a bunch of neo-con Mars colonization fanatics.

The word 'fanatic' comes from the Latin word describing people driven mad by the gods. 'Fantasy' comes from the Indoeuropean concept of a bright image.

These stories about Martian water crop up like clockwork. This latest one is rather dryly amusing in that it is anxious to pretend there is really lots and lots of water there just waiting to be used! Of course, anyone who works with dirt knows that there is a problem with water and dirt: until the dirt is thoroughly saturated, not a drop of it will appear on top.

So the excited stuff about 'covering all of Mars with 11 meters of water!' is stupid. Namely, Mars is so awfully dry, whole sectors of it are as dry as the very dry moon! The water there is confined to the poles and the ground surrounding the poles. But this ground has enough water, barely, to keep the polar ice from slowly melting into the permafrost that characterizes this planet.

It took me forever to dig up these pictures of Mars done with a neutronn spectrometer.

Los Alamos - March 1, 2002
Scientists today unveiled maps that detail the location of hydrogen, that may indicate water-ice, just below Mars' surface. The maps are based on data from a neutron spectrometer built at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory and flown aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey now in orbit around the Red planet. The data are supported by simultaneous measurements made using the Mars Odyssey's gamma-ray spectrometer.

I must have gone through several hundred NASA web pages, trying every possible combination of words, to dig this data up. It should have been easy but the concept of a dry Mars has been so annihilated for political reasons, it is really hard getting this information.

I saw these pictures when they first came out in 2002 and talked about it. But all the following news stories since then ignore this information. The excited stories this week are politically motivated: the Mars fanatics running NASA are alarmed at both the drop-off in interest in that planet and the recent questions in Congress concerning the possiblity we will be destroyed by asteroids and therefore better pay attention to these darn things, has alarmed them enough to make a big thing about this story.

To the casual observer, the news that Mars has water that could, if the planet were solid cement the water would cover it totally, seems like great news. We can colonize it after all! Of course, going back to reality, the planet isn't solid cement and if we extracted the water to fill huge basins of solid cement, the soil would then be even drier than it is today and it is very, very dry already!

Click here to see thermal and epithermal neutron maps of Mars.

The Sahara desert, just for example, has much more water hidden under it than most of Mars outside of the southern pole! Even parts of the lithosphere that have fallen away from the crust, even as it slides deeper and deeper into the mantle, it has lots of water from this saturation effect.

Indeed, just this month it was reported that one section under Tibet and another under the American Southwest has enough water to equal a small ocean! And this is in our own mantle, not even the top 10 km. The soil in my mountains here in New York is so saturated with water, even if it doesn't rain for a month, the streams and rivers still run. Right now, as a great deal of snow is melting, the streams are overflowing their banks and the rivers are roaring with water that is pouring into the vast oceans.

To get a good idea of volume, the water amounts on Mars probably is less than 10% of the water on our own planet.

Click here for some nice pictures of Mars courtesy of APOD.

While desperately searching for any mention of Mars being a really dessicated planet, I came across a number of stories about how it had water running in the past.

What could have formed these unusual channels? Inside a small crater that lies inside large Newton Crater on Mars, numerous narrow channels run from the top down to the crater floor. The above picture covers a region spanning about 3000 meters across. These and other gullies have been found on Mars in recent high-resolution pictures taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor robot spacecraft. Similar channels on Earth are formed by flowing water, but on Mars the temperature is normally too cold and the atmosphere too thin to sustain liquid water. Nevertheless, many scientists now hypothesize that liquid water did burst out here from underground Mars, eroded the gullies, and pooled at the bottom as it froze and evaporated.

Mars does have an atmophere and a climate. This includes thin, high clouds and dust storms. The planet is geologically nearly 'dead' in the sense that there is no longer any interior activity such as volcanoes, rifting or shifting of greater landmasses. The shrinking and growing polar ice sheets is the only other activity going on at this point.

Here is a photo showing Martian weather.

If you could stand on Mars -- what might you see? Like the robotic Opportunity rover rolling across the red planet, you might well see vast plains of red sand, an orange tinted sky, and wispy light clouds. The Opportunity rover captured just such a vista after arriving at Victoria Crater earlier this month, albeit in a completely different direction from the large crater. Unlike other Martian vistas, few rocks are visible in this exaggerated color image mosaic. The distant red horizon is so flat and featureless that it appears similar to the horizon toward a calm blue ocean on Earth. Clouds on Mars can be composed of either carbon dioxide ice or water ice, and can move quickly, like clouds move on Earth. The red dust in the Martian air can change the sky color above Mars from the blue that occurs above Earth toward the red, with the exact color depending on the density and particle size of the floating dust particles.

I live where it can go below zero fairly frequently in the middle of winter. Always, the air is very, very dry. It becomes an ice desert. The streams stop running, the moisture in the earth begins to dry up and we always pray there is snow on the ground when it gets this cold or we lose moisture in the pastures and the forest and then the plants suffer. The snow is very tiny chrystals and if the sun comes out, it evaporates faster than it melts.

Mars is that sort of climate only forever. There really is no warm spring to create running water. Back when the planet was young, the mantle was warm enough to make the ground warmer and there was water flowing all over the place. But since then, it has grown drier and drier as the planet's atmosphere outgasses the moisture relentlessly over time. There is precious little left at this point.

Here is an older story about the dream of water on the moon:

In the 1990s the Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecraft implied that such ice existed. The results were met with much fanfare in the media — it appeared that there was indeed ice on the Moon. But now scientists probing deep into the polar surface with radar have concluded that lunar ice, if present, will be more difficult to extract than some have proposed.

Theory says that it's tricky, but possible, to preserve water on the Moon. The Sun rises a scant 2° above the horizon at the poles. This means that the deepest craters have regions inside them that remain permanently in shadow. Water molecules ejected into space from rare cometary impacts might freeze into these pitch black "cold traps." Or perhaps hydrogen from the solar wind could combine with oxygen atoms in the lunar regolith (dust and rock) and form water molecules — a few of which find their way to the traps over the eons. Something like these processes must happen on barren Mercury, where radar has revealed sheets of ice at the planet's poles.

We really don't appreciate how much water we have on earth. The history of our own evolution as a life form is the biggest miracle and mystery of the Orion Arm of this galaxy: how did it happen? Water didn't simply interact with an atmosphere, the minute organisms began to evolve, they evolved a way of capturing the energy of the sun which would have gone towards evaporating all the water on this planet. They then released oxygen into the atmosphere and thus created the layer of gases we all breathe today.

This blanket of gases, the CO2 and the oxygen, protects the planet from the sun's naked fury and thus conserves the moisture instead of it all being destroyed as the sun fluxes and rages. The life-form created atmosphere protected the planet's water supply. And all life forms depend on this water existing so it was a perfect feed-back loop system that preserved one resource while creating a vast array of atmosphere-producing/changing chemical systems we call 'life'.

Possibly this blanket of water that is in places, many miles thick as well as tremendous soil saturation that goes all the way down to into the lithosphere is also why our mantle is probably much warmer than Mars. The planet is still quite flexible and dynamic, a multi-billion year youth that seems to never really age. Proof of this is the speed of tectonic plate movements.

Probably the last time that happened on Mars was 3 billion years ago.

And colonizing both the moon and Mars can be akin to working in a very dusty asbestos mine: fatal.

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, Houston

Scientists are investigating the possible threat posed to astronauts by inhaling lunar dust. A study suggests the smallest particles in lunar dust might be toxic, if comparisons with dust inhalation cases on Earth apply.

*snip*

These grains, called "nano-phase iron", are so small that, if inhaled, some would pass directly from the lungs into the blood circulation.

Once in the blood, the iron could "de-energise" the haemoglobin molecule which carries oxygen to the body's tissues. If enough gets dissolved in the blood, it could produce effects similar to carbon monoxide poisoning. However, exactly how much is required for this to happen remains an open question.

In addition, when some fine dust particles are examined under the microscope, they can be seen to be filled with holes - like Swiss cheese.

The sands of our own planet are not the same as this dust generated by meteor strikes and other hazards. The sun hasn't shone with total, vicious ferocity here as on the moon. Even Mars is more like the earth in that it, too, has an atmosphere. But the moon has been blasted by the sun for billions of years and the dust on the surface shows this.

People working on the lunar surface will be exposed to the dust they track indoors. Elaborate systems will have to be set up to protect them from bringing in this dust and this means of course, cutting off all real contact with the lunar surface except when there is little choice. In other words, this isn't going to be very easy to do, colonizing the moon has many grave difficulties the greatest being water itself. Water is very heavy to carry around and one would have to transport it all out of the gravitational pool of the earth and then we are removing our own basic life-source, all water that exits is gone forever and not replaced!

As always, the problem is to protect our planet, not devour it. It is far fairer and better than all the planets we have surveyed so far. Recklessly destroying it so we can live on dessicated or frozen worlds is just dumb.

Culture of Life News Main Page

NASA Doesn't Have Money For Tracking Killer Asteroids

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Every once in a blue moon, we get worried about asteroids and then that fades as we worry about Britney Spears' hair troubles. NASA decided to remind everyone about this tiny problem that might wipe out all living things. Will we bother doing anything? Heh.

We can do the job but we are broke, right?

SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn't enough money to pay for the task so it won't get done.

The cost to find at least 90 percent of the 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets by 2020 would be about $1 billion, according to a report NASA will release later this week. The report was previewed Monday at a Planetary Defense Conference in Washington.

Congress in 2005 asked NASA to come up with a plan to track most killer asteroids and propose how to deflect the potentially catastrophic ones.

"We know what to do, we just don't have the money," said Simon "Pete" Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center.

For want of a nail, a horse goes lame. The USA used to be interested in space things. We were going to conquer space, it was the Last Frontier. At the same moment in our history, we decided it would be tons more fun going bankrupt. Driving the world's strongest, wealthiest empire into bankruptcy takes a long time but we are rapidly reaching our goal.

We built, at great expense and with lots of trumpetting about how fantastic we are and how capitalism is better than communism even though we were behind the commies during much of the Space Race, we were supposed to ignore this! Ask any child today, who put the first satellite up, the first man in space, the first dog in space. They all think it was the USA just like many people here think we won WWII in Europe even though we didn't land in Normandy until Russia's armies were nearly at the borders of Germany!

Now China is challenging us. They are starting way behind us but we got pretty lax about things after Russia went bankrupt and seemingly, dropped out of the Space Race. Since we decided to spend all our future wealth on really dumb things like oppressing Muslim peasants who are very eager to blow us up with themselves in a mutual suicide-pact, we also have run out of money. And the Chinese will give it to us if we give them our technology.

Not that it is worth all that much. The Russians are the ones keeping humans in space. The Space Shuttle got shuffled back into the hanger because of damage from violent storms. Global warming has some downsides aside from the fact that the entire space port we built in Florida is barely above sea level and will disappear in 30 years, under water. If a mega-hurricane doesn't flatten it all, first.

Way back when I was a tadpole, I thought we needed a space program so we can outsource our industries to other planetary systems or galaxies far, far away. Then we can set up a money deal with them and try to cheat them while they try to bankrupt us. A good plan.

But we need money, first. Of course, what is another billion or so? The Pentagon spends that much per week in cost over-runs for their pet projects. And we spend that much a DAY at war. With peasants living in tents or mud huts. Who are winning. And killing many of us as well as each other and anything else.

And Congress won't cut their budget and redirect the funds to useful places. Just think: if an asteroid is coming here, we could get some suicide bombers to ambush it! Maybe that is why we are in Iraq: it is all training, preparing them for saving the planet earth.

They already nearly got Cheney. See? They can save us!

Oh, and before Bush pardons Libby, we really should arrest Cheney. And Bush. At least, impeach them.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Mars Mission Space Cadet Can't Understand Financial Reality

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Fake history of our space program abounds within the 'Go to Mars!' lunatics who also dream of building a big base on the moon (um, to do what?). They grossly misrepresent the reality behind our faltering space program when it comes to shuffling human biomass all over the place.

Here is an editorial by Carolyn Porco in the New York Times:

It is an opinion long and widely held within the space-exploration community that the Nixon administration’s termination of the program that built the Saturn V Moon rocket was a gargantuan mistake.

*snip*

In those early days, the possibilities for human space travel were intoxicating. Back then, NASA plans called for an aggressive integrated human flight program that would expand on the developments of Apollo: the establishment of a 50-person lunar base, a 100-person Earth-orbiting space station and human landfall on Mars, all by the mid-1980s. Those plans also included a 50-person semi-permanent Martian base by the end of the 20th century. Instead, we went nowhere.

Why? Because, largely for political reasons, we renounced the Moon, abandoned Apollo and the Saturn V and retreated to low Earth orbit, where we’ve spent the last 25 years going around in circles.

The cost to the nation of this misstep was enormous. For starters, we lost an investment, adjusted for inflation to 2007 dollars, of $160 billion. That was the cost to get to, land on, walk on, drive on and otherwise explore the Moon. (Of that amount, $29 billion, in inflation-adjusted dollars, was the approximate cost of the Saturn V.)

I remember the last trip to the moon. My father, Dr. Aden Meinel, watched the news that evening and then went outside the veranda of our ranch and looked at the moon sitting just above the dark purple mountains in the violet evening twilght and said, 'This is the last trip to the moon. There will be probably no others because there is no political reason to go there anymore.' He sighed and added, 'People will think this never really happened and it will be seen as a legend instead of real.'

As one of the fathers of NASA, he spoke from the heart in private but in public, he kept on trying to get Congress to spend money on space program things like the upcoming Hubble Space Telescope. Few Americans are aware that the first space telescope ended in the Atlantic Ocean. Getting Congress to pay for another try was very difficult. First, NASA had to make a reusable flight machine for putting up satellites like the Hubble Space Telescope.

Getting funding for this was nearly impossible. Few of the people goofing around with the notion of going to Mars really understand how stressed out the American economy was in the last years of Nixon: we were going bankrupt. Thanks to the Cold War and the Vietnam hot war, we spent all our good capital and good will collected after WWII. The dollar was dying against the yen and the deutsche mark. This was a severe problem, When I was in Germany in 1968, I got 4 DM to my dollar, in 1972, it was half that! Talk about collapse!

Russia was even more stressed. They gave up trying to take over the moon which was as useless to them as to us. So they decided to take the lower L orbits. They launched a space station. Our military flipped out. They needed one two. Russia offered, through the UN, to have both of us sign a 'Peaceful Uses of Space' treaty which the USA military refused to entertain at all.

So Congress was persuaded by the Pentagon to fund the Space Shuttle which was conceived of as and used mostly for, military purposes in space. It most certainly was NOT a civilian craft for science. Of course, the military applications were all top secret so no one ever hears of them except the Russians and Chinese who spy out what they are.

The concept of a reusable craft was for financial reasons. Back then, our government had to worry about pretending to balance the budget in some way. The 'tax revolt' was barely underway and it wasn't until Reagan, we got the full brunt of that silly revolution.

This latest article glosses over the grave economic hazards of wild spending on space exploration while at the same time, cities were burning down thanks to urban riots which then became a quarter century of increasing destruction on a daily basis of nearly all our major cities, and the de-industrialization of the northern half of America as factories began to ooze to cheaper labor/nonunion states. Reagan's tax cutting coupled with wild spending meant we could have our cake and eat it too. Even on Mars.

But no one was interested in space by then. The shuttle blew up when Reagan wanted to talk to the teacher put in space on a publicity stunt which went sour, spectacularly. After that, interest in space really waned. I watched from the front seats.

Over the years, a loud body of space enthusiasts, turned on by rather infantile TV shows where space travel was purely magical, began to agitate to go to Mars. At the same time, the human destruction of this planet has roared ahead with a vengeance, species going extinct at an amazing clip, global pollution/global warming and humans using up many natural resources rapidly, the ecology movement clashing with the space cadet movement leading to today: we are going bankrupt, doing practically nothing useful about both the planet earth AND the planet Mars.

All the present talk about the moon is military: the Chinese just showed us they can destroy all our satellites from weapons based on earth. They will next apply this to space-orbital platforms. They already said they will set up such systems on the moon and thus, double-trump us. So we suddenly announce, we will set up a military fort on the back side of the moon, hahaha.

But again, the only way we can do this thanks to the Reagan/monetarist/free trade revolution, by asking the Chinese for more loans.

And since this super-duper space cadet base is aimed at destroying China, it has zero chance of ever being built.

Of course, NASA and the Pentagon could ask us to pay taxes to make up the budget deficit, an extra half a trillion a year. Ha. I can see it now, them trying to run candidates on that ticket! 'We will double taxes so we can have a moon base!' is nifty! I'll make the posters and leaflets.

But of course, this latest space cadette is coy about funding. She talks about the loss of money 'invested' in the moon explorations. Well, if she wants to go to Mars, all she has to do is reform our nation so we have no trade or budget deficits and THEN tax everyone so she can have the extra trillion or three needed to do this little thing.

I seriously doubt this will happen. Russia doesn't pay for its continuing space program by getting IOUs from China, they formed a joint organization that is just getting off the launch pad that unites both so they can build that base on the moon and trump us.

Porcos ignores this reality because she is an American. Which means, dense as a turtle turned to stone. Ie: Stupid.

If America wants to be like Spock, we first have to learn how to balance a bank book, practice real diplomacy using words and good intentions and then we should look in a huge number of mirrors and fix all the ugly warts on our faces. We won't take over the moon or conquer Mars if we are mired in massive wars with peasants in Vietnam, Iraq, all of Africa or you name it. We are more likely to be conquered by space aliens than get anything off this earth at this rate.

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UFOs Over Phoenix, AZ, Were Military

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Living with the Pentagon, most of Arizona gets to enjoy lots of UFO hysteria. On top of this, pesky students and kids like myself like to launch UFOs, too. This is in the news yet again, time for aliens and outerspacy goofy stuff. They want our LEADERS!!!

UFOs constantly attack Phoenix, Arizona and other places near USA military bases.

(CBS4) PHOENIX, AZ Nearly a decade after the highly publicized ‘Phoenix Light Phenomenon’, more strange lights have appeared in the night sky over downtown Phoenix.

Tuesday night, mysterious lights lit up the western skies over Phoenix and soon after, phones began ringing off the hook at radio, television and police stations from witnesses wondering what the lights were.

The Yuma Marine Base claims it has the answer. Base officials said the amber-colored flares came from training flights on the Goldwater Gunnery Range. They went on to explain that the amber flares are used as targets.

I knew University of Arizona mining engineering frat students who used to build UFOs. They would use a weather balloon bought at the local military sales at Davis Monthan, attach a platform with a car battery and put on disco revolving lights and then launch this at night over Tucson and then watch TV and listen to the radio, laughing like crazy. Better than drinking a keg of beer. Yah.

The Watcher and Wizard are no more but the tradition of people flipping out over 'mysterious' lights continues. Arizona, having many military bases, is a great place for 'seeing' these mysterious lights in the sky. When rockets are lofted from Edwards Air Force Base, the setting sun would set them alight and the phones would ring in Phoenix and Tucson like it was the End of Times and not the vapor trail of yet another rocket.

Ditto other military bases.

I once was speaking at an SF convention. I said, 'I want to introduce you to space aliens!' and then hauled out a mirror. Everyone laughed but this didn't stop the infantile, silly beliefs that shiny lights=aliens from outer space.

Even as I tried to trigger sane logic, I failed. "Why in the names of Chthulu would aliens flash lights at us when trying to sneak around?" failed to stop the flood of "Look! Aliens are flashing lights at us! We are being invaded!" nonsense.

I always assumed that aliens capable of sneaking into our own atmosphere would be smart enough to hide themselves and not be tempted to turn on the lights, full blast, at night. On the other hand, maybe they are galactic teens teasing us for a hoot.

Can't blame them. They now can cease hacking the net and downing the servers and relish the panic and hysteria they cause by flipping on and off the highbeams on dad's space saucer. I hope humans are capable of logic. I presume aliens are logical.

These attempts at spooking humans isn't doing any good. Seems no one has kidnapped our leaders after flipping on and off the lights. Indeed, maybe we could arrange for this to happen more frequently. Maybe we could make a deal with these space alien teens to kidnap ALL our rulers! At once! Don't hold them for ransom. Just take them away. Far, far, far away.

None of this kidnapping of stupid drivers on back country roads. None of this kidnapping of sleep-walkers who own little and know nothing. Nope. Go for the gold. Then the alien teens can send us a message: 'We will feed your leaders to our space dogs who have tentacles and tiny but very sharp teeth.'

We can then negotiate the TV rights for broadcasting on cable. And of course, they could film it with their telephones. That would work. You Tube could carry it and they can get 20% of the advertising revenues. But then, they will be competing with the internet hackers and al Qaeda. This could lead to warfare as they all try to undermine each other.

Total chaos. This could lead to WWIV. Someone better alert Bush. He needs to polish his resume.

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Nowak Should NOT Be Jailed, She Suffers From Brain Damage

Elaine Meinel Supkis

One thing that really worried people interested in space exploration was the effect of cosmic rays and other events upon the astronauts. Looking at today's news of a woman astronaut who recently went into space, going insane and attacking another military woman, should be the imputus for more, urgent research in this field. I would suggest, she may have had some vital brain or nerve damage in space.

If you look at the before the trip to the International Space Station and the picture today, it looks like two totally different women.

By MARIA NEWMAN and CHRISTINE HAUSER
Published: February 6, 2007
The police in Orlando, Fla., filed attempted murder charges today against Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, a NASA astronaut who the authorities say attacked a rival for another astronaut’s affection at Orlando International Airport on Monday after driving more than 900 miles from Houston to meet her flight.

Captain Nowak, a Navy captain who flew on a shuttle mission last summer, was originally arrested on attempted kidnapping and other charges, and a judge initially set a $15,500 bond at a court session this morning.

I used to work in the Free Clinic in Berkeley years ago. We often had people with very serious mental health problems come in for help. Capt. Nowak looks like a speed freak or heroin addict.

We know that astronauts have to be very trim. And we know that military pilots have to fly, very alert, for many hours. And I know that speed is used by all sorts of people.

Obviously, in the past, it has been a serious problem for NASA, aside from the drinking parties the early astronauts and super-sonic jet pilots engaged in.

Published: January 31, 1989

LEAD: Random drug testing for key personnel, including astronauts, will start in March at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the chief of the agency has announced.

Random drug testing for key personnel, including astronauts, will start in March at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the chief of the agency has announced.

The NASA administrator, James C. Fletcher, said Thursday that a system of random drug testing will be applied to all employees in sensitive positions, including senior level management, astronauts, flight controllers, researchers and engineers.

In addition, Dr. Fletcher said, ''drug testing may be required if there is a reasonable suspicion of illegal drug use or an accident or unsafe practice.''

Of course, with screening for illegal drugs, one can overlook the astonishing effects of legal drugs. I looked up drugs used regularily by NASA and this is the top candidate for causing side effects that would look like speed freaks:

Phenergan:

• Seek emergency medical attention if you think you have used too much of this medicine. Symptoms of a promethazine overdose may include severe drowsiness, dizziness, dry mouth, large pupils, flushing, nausea, vomiting, shallow breathing, and fainting.
• Promethazine oral can cause side effects that may impair your thinking or reactions. Be careful if you drive or do anything that requires you to be awake and alert.
• Avoid drinking alcohol, which can increase some of the side effects of promethazine oral.
• There may be other drugs not listed that can affect promethazine oral. Tell your doctor about all the prescription and over-the-counter medications you use. This includes vitamins, minerals, herbal products, and drugs prescribed by other doctors. Do not start using a new medication without telling your doctor.

Promethazine oral is an antihistamine. It blocks the effects of the naturally occurring chemical histamine in your body.

I can't take these sorts of drugs because my body has an atypical reaction. Nor can I drink coffee or smoke cigarettes. My son inherited this anomaly. I don't know Nowak's history for taking this drug but it certainly is on the list of things that could have affected her mental health. The deterioration in not only her face but her hair makes me wonder about drugs in general.

In her early photo, her hair is shiny and full, flowing naturally. In the arrest picture, it is dry, broken and obviously much thinner. In today's news, her alarmed and upset family have denied she is the person she has become.

Many times when a person goes insane or has chemical damage, they become unrecognizable. They literally can't recognize themselves or their loved ones and try to commit suicide or run off after inappropriate objects or other mishaps. Often, they show obvious signs of brain damage long before they fall into a disaster or death but families work hard at ignoring the obvious.

Everyone likes to think they are sane. I have always maintained that humans are all 'insane' in so far as all other primates are concerned: we are unnatural and our culture makes us even more unnatural.

Part of keeping our own confidence up involves pretending we are 'normal'. This often means, when people are obviously brain damaged or suffering a break-down, everyone pretends they are normal. So when the police arrive, the closest people to the person arrested for some deranged crime nearly always say, 'But I never saw anything wrong with them!'

An alert outsider could have warned NASA and Nowak's family that she was falling apart. But no one spoke up. As someone who has put more than one person under medical supervision in a secure mental institution, I know how painful and difficult it is to convince someone, they are a danger to themselves and others. Gaging the deterioration of another person's mind is a tricky business since none of us are totally 'sane'---this is a judgment call!

In today's news, there are other things at work: astronauts can suffer brain damage also from cosmic rays or coming back after long periods in zero-g.

People can have strokes, for example.

March 25, 2002: Landing a spaceship is a terrible time to feel dizzy, yet that's what happens to some astronauts. Their legs become heavy and their heads light even as the planet below expands to fill the windshield. It's an unwelcome side-effect of returning home.

Researchers have learned that the sensation is caused, in part, by orthostatic hypotension -- "in other words, a temporary drop in blood pressure," explains NASA Chief Medical Officer Rich Williams. On Earth you can feel it by standing or sitting up too fast. Gravity has much the same effect on astronauts returning from a long spell in space: Blood rushes down and the space travelers become, literally, lightheaded.

Due to changes in the astronaut's environment, they can have small stroke-like events. Or the anti-nausea drugs might interact with the effects of being compressed in odd ways. The main thing is, not everyone has the same bodies: we are all different in often subtle ways.

The other thing that could have happened since this woman also walked in space, is brain damage from cosmic rays.

Some of us have worried in the past about long-term exposure to such rays.

More worrisome is the radiation produced by solar flares, periodic eruptions during which the sun releases energy equivalent to a billion mega-tons of TNT. The Earth is protected from these lethal streams by the atmosphere and ozone layer, two luxuries not enjoyed by astronauts. If a spacewalker were to be inadvertently exposed to solar-flare radiation, odds are he or she would come down with fatal radiation sickness. The good news is that, since solar flares can be detected before the particles arrive, there is often plenty of time for a spacewalker to find a well-shielded spot aboard a spacecraft.

But even shielding does little good against so-called galactic cosmic radiation, which originates in deep space. Consisting chiefly of high-energy protons and electrons produced by stars, black holes, and gamma-ray bursts, GCR is tough to defend against.

These things are random chance with a vengeance. All evolution of all living things ultimately are due to rays like these jolting the delicate tracery of atoms that make up our molecular beings occasionally get rearranged by these cosmic forces. We call this 'mutations'.

On earth, we are protected by the atmosphere which presses down upon us, it deflects or absorbs all sorts of cosmic material including stuff spat at us by sunspots or other events. Sometimes our sun chooses to shower us with x-rays, for example. Astronauts have to go into 'secure' places when this happens but even there, cosmic rays can penetrate.

If one passed through an astronaut and causes a cascade of brain-related problems, we can't tell except maybe to do an autopsy. But like a surgeon's knife, one can sever important connections or trigger things deep inside the brain. Namely, the deepest parts of our being well up out of the most primitive parts of the brain and if a cosmic ray zings something where our 'fight/flight/love/hate' impulses originate, this can cause behavioral problems.

Psychiatrists have witnessed many sorts of behavioral problems that come from seemingly small brain injuries. A stroke or a crash can cause a startling change in personality. Soldiers are notorious for this, we see it all the time with them suffering from various syndromes which drive them to commit murder, suicide or acting out inappropriately in public.

Aside from all this, I have worried about women and our relation with the moon. All living things, we being creatures hatched in the ocean tidal pools eons ago, are subject to the moon's gravitational pull and waning and waxing. Women, more than men, are sensitive to this ghostly orb. Our periods are ruled by the moon, we bleed or breed to its rhythms. This might make space travel very hazardous for us. We know very little about this. It might mangle our ability to reproduce!

Instead of putting this poor woman in prison, I would strongly suggest she be protected from herself and she should be examined very closely by the best psychiatrists and environmental doctors. This may be very important for the future of space travel if her brain was damaged by her space walks.

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