Space News

Scientists Notice New 'Hobbit' Galaxies Are Falling Into Our Own Galaxy

Elaine Meinel Supkis

New class of galaxies called 'Hobbit' galaxies are spotted by modern telescopic instruments. These now suddenly visible entities alert us to the fact that space is far from 'empty' but is filled with all the stuff started with the Big Bang. This is why space is NOT 'flying apart faster and faster' but is rather, still pulling together, heading towards the New Big Bang.

&hearts Much of what is in space is invisible because it doesn't shine enough or at all.

Scientists familiar with "The Lord of the Rings" have coined a name for a new class of ultra-faint galaxies in Earth's Local Group of galaxies: "hobbit."

The Local Group is a collection of about 40 galaxies, dominated by the Milky Way and Andromeda. The rest are mostly small satellites known as "dwarf galaxies" that are gravitationally bound to these two galaxies. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are two of the Milky Way's better known dwarf galaxies.

A recent sky survey revealed eight new members in our Local Group of galaxies, including the "hobbit" galaxies and what might be the smallest galaxy ever discovered.

"They seem to be much fainter than anyone suspected galaxies could be before," said study team member Daniel Zucker of Cambridge University. "So rather than dwarf galaxies, we should perhaps call them ‘hobbit galaxies.'"

What this means is space has lots of galaxies of many different sizes from the very, very small to the absolutely gigantic. Second, we can plainly see the bigger galaxies are attracting the smaller ones and the smaller ones attract even smaller ones and so on down the scale.

What is very interesting is how a large number of the dwarf and hobbit galaxies are actually conglamorations of very, very, very old stars. Sort of like our own sun, yellow. Billions of years old. And more important, they are all coming in to our galaxy like birds heading towards the huge oak tree in the middle of my lower pasture, to roost.

Everywhere we look now, we see them. As we scan the heavens and try to identify all the light information there, we see more and more of these guys, coming towards us, not flying away. They weren't wrenched from another galaxy, we, ourselves have not merged with any great galaxies yet, at least not since our own hobbit galaxy was pulled apart by the Milky Way about 1.5 billion years ago.

Right now, all these captive galaxies are dropping into our gravitational pool and will join us in the outer arms of this mid-sized galaxy. In turn, we are all dropping towards the bigger Andromeda galaxy that lies off in the sector of the Pegasus Square, to turns silently in the darkness out there, many similiar dwarf and hobbit galaxies are helplessly being drawn into it, too. Their faint yellow suns invisible to us but for them, if, and there is a 100% chance there are habitable planets in these safe, small galaxies!---rational life forms are gazing in wonder at the huge, churning maelstrom of stars in the skies above, so bright, the galaxy can be seen even during the day. If they have any astronomers, they can't see the little yellow star in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.

But if they plot the redshift and if they are clever and realize that everything in space travels in curves, they will realize their homeworld will fall into the grip of the Milky Way and I am certain they feel a bit of panic, wondering how this will effect them.

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.

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.

The eighth and most recently spotted galaxy is in many ways the most interesting. Titled Leo T, it is about 1.4 million light-years away from Earth, so far away that it floats freely in space, unperturbed by the Milky Way.

NOTHING 'floats freely' in space. NOTHING. Everyone is in the grip of the gravitational pull of something else and all things are being pulled by all bigger things without exception. A more distant galaxy may SEEM as if it were standing still vis a vis ourselves but this is an illusion: it is falling which is why it is in our neighborhood. After all, if the universe were expanding, it wouldn't be loitering on the edge of our gravitational pool, it would be flying merrily into nothingness.

Perhaps evolution can't work so well in the chaos of the inner galactic core but happens mostly on satellites around old yellow stars happily circling each other in these hobbit and dwarf galaxies? Perhaps on one of these possible planets (astronomically speaking, it is nearly inevitable that out of the thousands of these tiny galaxies, there are more then one that has technology as high as our own) researchers are frantic to develop intergalactic flight so they can do something before they are swallowed up by our galaxy?

Sp far from being 'unperturbed by the Milky Way,' perhaps they are right now in total panic? They clearly see the other galaxies that are preceeding them, falling into the grip of this huge, white-ringed with vast clouds of thick dirt that light can't pass through, the middle of this mess glowing malevolently with a brilliant egg-yolk yellow center? I am assuming the eggs have yellow yokes, the stars these aliens circle being a yellow sun and they, not insects seeing the infrared, but what if they are that?

They can plainly see via their multimirror-array eyes, the infrared of our galaxy and this shows where the violent astral activity is! Oh my!

There are armies of humans on this planet who ardently believe we are being visited by aliens who love to flash lights at us. Every time some unexplained light in the sky happens, people rush about, screaming about aliens.

I think the youth of these aliens who finally developed their worm-hole jumping space craft have spotted this wayward yellow star and are now playing with flashlights with us, just like we used to do when children, trying to fool fireflies. If these alien kids are like our own, they are probably hacking our systems in order to make us run around like crazy, killing each other.

Yeah, that's it. That explains what is going on today. See? Anyone suggesting astronomy is useless just has to have a little imagination!

When I was a child, I saw in all the movies and cartoons about aliens from space, the Astronomer and or Rocket Scientist called upon to rescue humans always had a pretty daughter that the Space Commander would fall in love with....as my father used to say, 'I pity any alien who tries to mess with you.' Ditto any space commander, of course.

But then, my father liked to think aliens would be friendly and interested in talking science. I knew this would be false, everyone is interested in sex and power. And eating. This could be a problem if the aliens took after Tyrannosaurus Rexes. Or Martha Stewart.

This is why we must watch there Hobbit and Dwarf galaxies. What if we spot other ones that would be called 'Orc' galaxies? Or 'Elf'?

Maybe that huge oak in my pasture is really an alien Ent? Grazing quietly, moving a few inches a year. I might wake up and find it front of the back door! Perhaps the many Chickadees living in that tree are really its eyes and ears? "Chickadee...dee...dee!" might be alien talk for "Take me to your leader...oh, forget it."?

Culture of Life News Main Page

A Small History Of the Space Programs In China, America and Germany

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The strange history of the Chinese space program and my family: intertwined with covens in Pasadena, Nazis in Europe, the beginning of the OSS and the CIA, the Skull and Bones and the Portals to the Outer Darkness, understanding space and time and how this all tangles together by the Fates spinning out the future and the past. This story will sound insane but it is very real.

&hearts The Chinese space program, flush with lots of FOREX funding, is taking off like a rocket. Here is a thumbnail history of the father of the Chinese space program, Tsien Hsue-shen:

In 1936 Tsien Hsue-shen went to the California Institute of Technology to commence graduate studies on the referral of Theodore von Kármán. Tsien obtained his doctorate in 1939 and would remain at Caltech for 20 years, ultimately becoming the Goddard Professor and establishing a reputation as one of the leading rocket scientists in the United States.

It was shortly after arriving at Caltech that Tsien was attracted to the rocketry ideas of Frank Malina and a few other students of von Kármán, and their associates. Around Caltech the dangerous and explosive nature of their work earned them the nickname "Suicide Squad."

My father not only knew him, they were kind of close, like real close. My father is younger than he and the other founders of the Jet Propulsion Lab. Indeed, my father was a high school student when the founders got together and started their rocket club. My father's family is very tied in with Cal Tech and so he hung out there before going to college.

Tsien is a tremendous genius. My father learned a lot from him. He wasn't the only Chinese scientist my family associated with, I grew up knowing lots of Chinese as well as German rocket scientists and astronomers. But all this is before my time, the roots of the strange things going on today.

In 1943, Tsien and two others in the Caltech rocketry group drafted the first document to use the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory; it was a proposal to the Army to develop missiles in response to Germany's V-2 rocket. This led to the Private A, which flew in 1944, and later the Corporal, the WAC Corporal, etc.

After World War II he served in the United States Army as a Lieutenant Colonel. Tsien was sent by the Army to Germany and was part of the team that examined captured German V-2 rockets.

The first team sent to Germany were the East Coast scientists from MIT. Their plane was shot down and they all died. Their mission was classified as top secret (even today?). So a back up was sought most urgently. The obvious team was the one at Caltech. First, they needed someone who spoke German, had a German name and could pass as a German and could call upon Germans for assistance since he would be working at the very front, nay, in front of the Allied forces.

The youngest member of the Caltech rocket club had all those qualifications: there were and are today, many Meinels in Germany involved in all the sciences. Back then, one of the German generals in the Wehrmacht was a Meinel, too.

&hearts Jack Parsons, the founding member of this club as well as senior in age, wanted to head up the search for the Nazi rockets because he wanted to use these things for his own ends.

Parsons was also an avid practitioner of the occult arts, and a follower of Thelema. He saw no contradiction between his scientific and magical pursuits: before each rocket test launch, Parsons would invoke the god Pan.

He was chosen by Aleister Crowley to lead Agape Lodge, the Thelemic Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) in California in 1942 after Crowley expelled Wilfred Smith from the position.

Sarah Elizabeth Northrup (AKA 'Betty'), began living with Parsons after his wife (Sarah's sister) Helen Northrup left with Wilfred Smith. Sarah Elizabeth Northrup later married L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology and sometime magickal partner of Parsons. Parsons and Hubbard participated in a ritual known as the Babalon Working which is famous in occult circles — loosely, it was an attempt to summon a living goddess and change the course of history.

The FBI came to California to check him out and report back to Roosevelt himself. They discovered his occult activities and nixed him. This left my father as the one selected to go to Germany. From that moment on, Jack hated my father with a passion.

My father had many interesting adventures that took him first to DC to meet the dying President where he recieved the power to compell even top generals to follow his orders. He then flew to Eisenhower who I suspect laughed to death secretly when he saw what was going on. He assigned my dad to General Patton!

On top of this, the Navy won the right to take on the rocket program so my father had to go to Patton while wearing a naval officier's uniform and inform him, he was to take orders from himself from now on.

My father succeeded in his mission. He also saw all the horrors of the Nazi death camp system. One example of his activities was when he located a secret lab where scientists were still working on rocket designs, he walked into the room, called everyone's attention to himself. Explained to them, they had ten minutes to choose: come with him or go meet the Soviets who were at that moment coming over the other hills around Jena. They looked at each other and then began to run to him, only he needed the paperwork so they stuffed it all in whatever they could.

Tsien was tapped to come to Wiesbaden to help sort through all the paperwork and assist in the interrogations. The German scientists stayed at the castle nearby where my father worked. I visited this place and talked to the caretaker who remembered a lot about those days (much of this information is stuff I got from various people I tracked down myself over the years). My father and Tsien became close friends during that time.

My father was only 23 years old in 1946. I still shake my head, wondering about this. &hearts Here is my father's wikipedia listing:

Aden B. Meinel is an American astronomer. He retired in 1993 as a Distinguished Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is also holds the rank of Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona Optical Sciences Center. His research interests have included upper atmospheric physics, glass technology, optical design, instrumentation and space systems.
Meinel received his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley in 1949. His dissertation is entitled A Spectrographic Study of the Night Sky and Aurora in the Near Infrared. In 1954, he was awarded the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society. He received the George Van Biesbroeck Prize in 1990.

It leaves out about 90% of his life. This is the whole 'secret life of the CIA' effect one gets even today. Deeds from 60 years ago, invisible. My father, already a major mover and shaker in the world, the man who brought away, under fire from the Russians, a great deal of the German rocket program, is invisible because this was all secret.

But everywhere I went in Germany, the minute I explained who I was and what I was seeking, German scientists or retired military men would start talking about what a great man he is. It was really an eye-opener for me.

When my father's work was done in Germany, he came home and decided he better get a degree! So he moved to Berkeley and went to U C. I am thinking, he wanted to avoid Jack Parsons. During this time, Parsons was busy throwing magic spells. They did this at China Lake in Death Valley. It is a tad creepy to me that I lived there for a while once when my father was doing rocket research...

He and Ron Hubbard wanted to bring into the world a girl who would turn the Wheel of Fate, one that would be born on a magical conjunction of planets, a wild child...who has strange things surrounding her (though they never dreamed it would be Pegasus!). They hoped their women would provide this personage.

They didn't. My mother had three daughters during this time, I was born in 1950. At this time, my father resumed visits with Tsien. Then the McCarthy era began in ernest. I clearly remember my father tracking the news on the newfangled black and white TV set. I remember him being scared. I overheard scientists arguing about all this, the fear was like the smell of ozone before a thunderstorm

Soon after Tsien applied for U.S. citizenship in 1950, allegations were made that he was a communist and his security clearance was revoked. The Federal Bureau of Investigation located a 1938 US Communist Party document with his name on it. Tsien found himself unable to pursue his career and within two weeks announced plans to return to mainland China. After his announcement the U.S. government wavered between deporting him and refusing to allow his departure due to his knowledge. Tsien became the subject of five years of secret diplomacy and negotiation between the United States and PRC.

The country was now being run by a gang of right wing Republicans. As usual, they did a perfectly stinky job of it. They drove out of the country a great scientist and sent him off to China, a country we refused to recognize and pretended to fear. Hsien didn't forget my father, though.

In 1955 Tsien was released and deported from the United States as a part of post-Korean war negotiations to free American prisoners of war held by China. He went to work as head of the Chinese missile program immediately upon his arrival in China. Tsien deliberately left his research papers behind when he left the United States. Tsien joined the Communist Party of China in 1958.
Tsien established the Institute of Mechanics and began to retrain Chinese engineers in the techniques he had learned in the United States and retool the infrastructure of the Chinese program. Within a year Tsien submitted a proposal to the PRC government to establish a ballistic missile program. This proposal was accepted and Tsien was named the first director of the program in late 1956. By 1958 Tsien had finalized the plans of the Dongfeng missile which was first successfully launched in 1964 just prior to China's first successful nuclear weapons test. Tsien's program was also responsible for the development of the widespread Silkworm missile.

I suspect much of our fleet being crammed into the tiny tepid bathtub at the doors of Iran will have to deal with these same Silkworm missiles. It won't be pretty.

Back to my story: Jack Parsons lived only a short ways away from my grandfather's house near Cal Tech.

Jack Parsons died on June 17, 1952 in an explosion of Fulminate of Mercury at his home laboratory which is generally regarded as accidental — he stored many volatile chemicals and compounds in the lab. Though gravely injured, he survived the explosion, only to die of his wounds. Unsubstantiated rumors have suggested that Parsons' death might not have been accidental. A rumor that keeps circulating was that Parsons was trying to create a homonculous based on Aleister Crowley's notes. Supposedly, Crowley's books on spells and rituals are rife with "alchemical" booby traps. Considering Parson's scientific expertise, it's considered suspicious that he would make such a careless mistake of mixing mercury with another compound known to be explosive.

Distraught, Parsons's mother killed herself not long after he died.

The Parsons crater on the far side of the Moon has been named after him.
Conspiracy theorists also note that the naming of the crater is suspect seeing as how no one will ever see this "memorial"

All the characters in this story have craters named for themselves on the Dark Side of the Moon. Including my grandfather. Also on Mars. It is rather a long inside joke, actually.

Back to the days of the beginning of NASA and the space program: since I was a very strange person from the earliest days, being hit repeatedly by lightning and this being witnessed by the rocket scientists, astronomers and geologists who hung out with my dad, I was privvy to many of the strange belief systems and odd businesses many of them practiced with varying levels of secrecy.

The founding father of the Chinese space program is a spirtualist, for example. My parents have their own system which emphatically clashes with my own. I picked mine literally off of the floor of the entrance to Yerkes Observatory, the mosaic of the constellations.

This being a rather small world, we all knew each other, I knew many famous scientists simply because they lived next door or came to the mountain, we often lived on the mountains where the great observatories stood.

When Nixon went to China, Tsien told Chou Enlai to ask Kissinger to send over my father. This is how my parents ended up working in China. Back then, I told them the Chinese will overtake America and win by 2020. They thought I was crazy (Cassandra is never believed). They did remark as to how swiftly the Chinese learned everything set before them. The contrasted that with teaching in America. I warned them, this was no surprise, the Chinese culture has a tremendous, long history of science and learning that is stellar.

To this day, it irritates me terribly to see the snide, sneering way Americans talk about the Chinese. Doesn't matter what the topic is! I start off at my blog wanting to talk about things only to get drawn into a fury reading other people's writings, 'professionals' who are childishly biased and short-sighted.

My own interactions with the Chinese has been most instructive: when I sat down with books and graphs and talked about economics and money, they actually listened to me! And understood me! I still shake my head in astonishment.

Throughout this, there lurks the dragon of magic. Every once and a while, one can feel him slinking about underfoot. People like to think that scientists are all pointy-headed realists. This is totally false.

They are above all, dreamers who try to look behind the mirror, who want to ride the rainbow or defy the stormy seas. Science has always had a Mephistopholean magical facet since the very beginning. Astronomy and religion were born from the same womb and grew up together, side by side. They are actually twins. One dark, one light.

The rocket program attracted this sort of person, they didn't want to do small things and then work their way up, they wanted right off the bat, to go to Mars, the Moon, to the stars! Many of them were and are avid science fiction fans. Many of them including myself, are in science fiction stories (that girl on a talking horse who likes to swing swords and have fun in bed is a familiar character, isn't she?).

Today we are seeing NASA in increasing disarray due to the fissure between the needs of the military and the needs of saving humanity and exploring the universe. This battle for dominance has raged since the middle of WWII. With the collapse of the Cold War, it should have led to the triumph of the futurists. But the Star Wars program dragged on, the brutalization of the Chinese and Russian people turned them away from us.

We lost a historic opportunity to work with both on the much-needed Interstellar Flight project. Instead, we are in an astral arms race. One the USA is doomed to lose for we don't have the funds to do much of anything. And if this all leads to war, this is the worst-case scenario! Science fiction writers have clearly shown us what this disaster will bring. It isn't pretty.

I want to turn the Wheel of Fate. I want to move it away from its present destination. I always knew the Chinese would succeed in developing a robot in space that can eliminate all our satellites. I know the USA can blow up all the cities on earth in just one horrific day.

And I know this is a fool's errand. We have to stop trying to rule this planet. We can't do it. We have to drop the dream of superman, the arrogant ruler who sneers and replace it with the curious scientist looking at nature, wanting to understand the pattern of the stars and the history of the universe.

The magic of love not the bile of hate. The Muslim world has many good scientists, the Hindus of India have given us some of the most magnificent minds in all the sciences especially astronomy. This cuts across all religions. The quest for knowledge is for everyone! All people! After all, Science is one of the Graces, Astronomy is too. And History. They all live with Pegasus on his high mountain where his golden hooves stamp out clear waters. He is more interested in flying to the stars, not war.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Chinese Successfully Shoot Down Weather Satellite

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As I predicted and expected, the Chinese have been developing systems to neutralize our aggressive Star Wars military program. Way back when I was lobbying for the USA to finally sign the Space Peace Treaty the UN was sponsoring, I was told that we would be able to uniltarerally rule the earth if we could neutralize Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles. I said back then, this was a stupid idea doomed to failure.

&hearts The Chinese, using lasers, tagged one of our spy satellites last October---now they have demonstrated the ability to destroy any satellite they wish.

The United States, Australia and Canada have criticised China over a weapons test it is said to have carried out in space last week.

The Americans say the Chinese sent up a ballistic missile to destroy an ageing weather satellite.

Earlier, a report in the American Aviation Week magazine said that US spy agencies had concluded that China conducted a successful test of a satellite-killing weapon on January 11.

This is HUUUUGE news. Very, very, very big news. Don't expect to see a peep about this in the mainstream. Everyone is agog about the two kidnapped boys and the popularity of 'American Idol' and wondering if Britanney Spears is going to fall asleep at a party!

But trust me, this news is gigantic.

For half of my long life, I have fought the concept of the Star Wars program. A total waste of precious funds, a madcap idea I demolished over and over and over again, so much so, googling information for this story brought up many of my past articles and none were from when I was published years ago by the NYT or WP or other papers.

I was busy pushing for space telescopes, funding research for interstellar flight and other neat things back in the early seventies and on. I also supported the Peaceful Uses of Space UN stuff.

This news is most interesting on many levels. First, they chose a standard Magic Number day: 1/11/7. A fine day. Add the numbers and you get '19'. Well, this could be coincidence or it could be the Chinese doing the 'auspicious day' thing they have a long history of enjoying.

This event was a direct shot across the prow of our sinking USSA Titanic: it clearly shows our arrogant belief we can spy on the Chinese, pry into their private, sovereign affairs, ignore their diplomatic gestures, insult their President when he tries to have a simple social visit, seduce Taiwan into arming itself so it can menace China, etc, etc. All our belligerence, our refusal to cooperate on even simple matters like disarming North Korea (China doesn't want nukes on their borders!) etc, etc. Bush and the neo cons threw garbage at China and laughed and tormented the Chinese and sneered at them and made demands when meeting them.

And we did this thinking we had them in a hammer-lock thanks to our domination of space. The entire space program is now military. Bush and his useful idiot, Griffin, are dumping all the good NASA programs and concentrating on building a miltiary base on the moon and then using that to dominate the L-orbits around the earth.

We figure we can then knock out any satellites put up by the Russians or Chinese. Back in the seventies, I warned Americans not to underestimate the Russians or even the Chinese. The Chinese invented many things including paper money and fireworks and the very earliest rockets (1500 AD!). They are quite capable of inventing things. And Russia beat us at many points in the race to space!

Up until the conquest of the moon, they were usually ahead of us. Most Americans are unaware of this long string of victories the Russians racked up against us.

When the very expensive and useless Star Wars program was announced by Reagan, we already had a long, five year fight within the space colonization/exploration community about the merits and weaknesses of such a program.

I was one of the big pushers of the demerits of Star Wars.

&hearts Back 30 years ago, outraged Chinese and Russian diplomats demanded the USA not militarize space but the USA sneered at them and continued onwards.

Strong and almost unanimous opposition to weaponization of space has been expressed in the United Nations Conference on Disarmament. China and Russia have drafted text for a treaty to ban space weapons. The United States, however, has refused to enter negotiations on such a treaty.

Note in today's article the hysteria of the USA and their Axis of Evil partners, mostly remnants of the British Empire (who we revolted against, isn't history a hoot?). We are striving very hard to pretend this Axis which is invading many countries, is selflessly disarming dangerous despots, not on yet another conquest of natives jag.

&hearts I wanted the USA to sign the treaties the UN was pushing to prevent Star Wars and other military uses of space:

Article II
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

Article III
States Parties to the Treaty shall carry on activities in the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, in accordance with international law, including the Charter of the United Nations, in the interest of maintaining international peace and security and promoting international co-operation and understanding.

Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty prohibits placing in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It also prohibits the testing and the deployment of any kind of weapon on the moon or other celestial bodies.

The USA decided it was better to be an outlaw nation and to conquer space and use it as our forward base for dominating the earth. Make no mistake, the very scientists and thinkers within the space exploration movement were very aware that if we could neutralize Russian ballistic missiles, we could menace them with impunity and worse, ATTACK UNILATERALLY.

If we could perfect Star Wars, the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction would bend and break and we could wage onesided nuclear war. This fact was carefully hidden from public view and all my attempts at getting it out was thwarted (secrecy and all that).

I even went so far as to suggest various systems that could wreck the Star Wars systems but no one listened to me or the scientists who also figured out the obvious. Simply using decoys could ruin the whole concept. We can't build more rockets if they build more decoys that are cheaper. And I noted back then, all systems that could defeat our Star Wars stuff was terribly cheap! And our system, very expensive!

The logic of the cost/benefit ratios was obvious: there was no way we could succeed and keep out of bankruptcy.

&hearts Thanks to William Safire and the NYT, Ronnie Reagan endorsed this madcap, doomed scheme:

The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression -- to preserve freedom and peace.

Since the dawn of the atomic age, we've sought to reduce the risk of war by maintaining a strong deterrent and by seeking genuine arms control. "Deterrence" means simply this: making sure any adversary who thinks about attacking the United States, or our allies, or our vital interest, concludes that the risks to him outweigh any potential gains. Once he understands that, he won't attack. We maintain the peace through our strength; weakness only invites aggression.

This strategy of deterrence has not changed. It still works. But what it takes to maintain deterrence has changed. It took one kind of military force to deter an attack when, we had far more nuclear weapons than any other power; it takes another kind now that the Soviets, for example, have enough accurate and powerful nuclear weapons to destroy virtually all of our missiles on the ground. Now, this is not to say that the Soviet Union is planning to make war on us. Nor do I believe a war is inevitable -- quite the contrary. But what must be recognized is that our security is based on being prepared to meet all threats.

There was a time when we depended on coastal forts and artillery batteries, because, with the weaponry of that day, any attack would have had to come by sea. Well, this is a different world, and our defenses must be based on recognition and awareness of the weaponry possessed by other nations in the nuclear age.

We can't afford to believe that we will never be threatened. There have been two world wars in my lifetime. We didn't start them and, indeed, did everything we could to avoid being drawn into them. But we were ill-prepared for both. Had we been better prepared, peace might have been preserved.

For 20 years the Soviet Union has been accumulating enormous military might. They didn't stop when their forces exceeded all requirements of a legitimate defensive capability. And they haven't stopped now. During the past decade and a half, the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal of new strategic nuclear weapons -- weapons that can strike directly at the United States.

As an example, the United States introduced its last new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minute Man III, in 1969, and we're now dismantling our even older Titan missiles. But what has the Soviet Union done in these intervening years? Well, since 1969 the Soviet Union has built five new classes of ICBM's, and upgraded these eight times. As a result, their missiles are much more powerful and accurate than they were several years ago, and they continue to develop more, while ours are increasingly obsolete. (...)

There was a time when we were able to offset superior Soviet numbers with higher quality, but today they are building weapons as sophisticated and modern as our own.

As the Soviets have increased their military power, they've been emboldened to extend that power. They're spreading their military influence in ways that can directly challenge our vital interests and those of our allies. (...)

Some people may still ask: Would the Soviets ever use their formidable military power? Well, again, can we afford to believe they won't? There is Afghanistan. And in Poland, the Soviets denied the will of the people and in so doing demonstrated to the world how their military power could also be used to intimidate.

...The Soviet Union is acquiring what can only be considered an offensive military force. They have continued to build far more intercontinental ballistic missiles than they could possible need simply to deter an attack. Their conventional forces are trained and equipped not so much to defend against an attack as they are to permit sudden, surprise offensives of their own.

Our NATO allies have assumed a great defense burden, including the military draft in most countries. We're working with them and our other friends around the world to do more. Our defensive strategy means we need military forces that can move very quickly, forces that are trained and ready to respond to any emergency.

Every item in our defense program -- our ships, our tanks, our planes, our funds for training and spare parts -- is intended for one all-important purpose: to keep the peace. Unfortunately, a decade of neglecting our military forces has called into question our ability to do that.

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of the century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of efforts on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.

In the meantime, we will continue to pursue real reductions in nuclear arms, negotiating from a position of strength that can be ensured only by modernizing our strategic forces. At the same time, we must take steps to reduce the risk of a conventional military conflict escalating to nuclear war by improving our non-nuclear capabilities.

These are exerpts of his very long speech. Throughout, he kept claiming we were doing this in self-defence. THIS WAS A LIE. The military guys assured us secretly that the brief time the window of opportunity existed whereby we could destroy their missiles in their silos and them figuring out and building dummies, etc, we would attack Russia.

I was totally grossed out by this. Luckily for all humanity, Russia went bankrupt.

I will note here how Reagan had to pretend he was for DISARMING NUCLEAR MISSILES! Today, with no opponents except for barely armed peasants, we are arming ourselves in a mad arms race we launched and fed. We let the world know via the neo cons "New World Order" garbage, we intend this to be "The American Century" and we plan to rule the earth no matter what and we plan to build miliitary platforms in space and destroy anyone who dares to challenge us.

We threw down the gauntlet. Bush dared the Russians and the Chinese to "Bring it on!" And they are. Oh, are they ever.

There is no need for nuclear war. We don't need to nuke Iran to bring disarmament. We don't need to have nuclear bombs circling the earth, ready to destroy other nation's satellites. We don't need a bunch of occultist satanists praying to the Devil that is Death leading us into the stupid Star Wars nightmare. Didn't anyone learn the lessons of that movie series? Huh?

We can't be Darth Vader.

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USA, Going Bankrupt, Must Buy Russian Rockets For NASA

Elaine Meinel Supkis
Another sign of our stumbling empire: NASA is buying Russian rockets, not just hiring them to lift stuff to the space station, we are buying the actual rockets because the Shuttle is falling apart. Years ago, back in the late 1970's, rocket developers cautioned Congress to begin work on new space mission systems because the Shuttles would not last beyond 2000.

&hearts This amazing story appeared only on a few select space-news websites, not the major science sites or the major media in general.

MosNews

NASA has agreed to the price and the delivery dates of the four spacecrafts from the Russian Federal Space Agency, RIA Novosti news agency reported.

NASA is to buy four Russian ships including two Soyuz and two Progress spacecrafts.

“NASA wishes to retire its Shuttles as soon as possible to ensure funds for the construction of their new craft,” the head of Russia’s manned flight programs Alexie Krasnov said. ’We are happy to help with the availability of our reliable vehicles.“

Earlier in the year it was reported that NASA was interested in buying the services of one Soyuz to allow US astronauts to travel to and from the ISS as a contingency for any problems with their Space Shuttle fleet.

Even as we bellow around the world, screaming at Russia and China about their lack of human rights, lack of democracy, lack of cooperation with disarming only those nations that are against Israeli aggression, we quietly go to Russia, cup in hand, begging for their technology or to China, cup in hand, begging for money.

Back in the 1970's, rocket scientists warned Congress, they must begin preparing for the 21st century by funding and hiring rocket scientists to work on future generations of space craft, not just work on various satellites. When Bush became President, one of the interest groups he appealed to were the space buffs who wanted to go to Mars and beyond.

From the very beginning of the movement to launch humans into space, there has been a tendency for this to be sponsored mostly by right wing organizations or the various organizations pushing for this were heavily infiltrated with right wingers. This was because the liberal community always wanted to spend money on things at home.

I was always a cross-over person, politically very liberal, nay, radical, while still having strong conservative impulses such as balancing budgets, etc.---I always believed that the survival of humanity hinges on not only colonizing this solar system but also interstellar colonization. Back in the old days when a few people listened to me, I used to push Congress to fund futuristic enterprises and I often told them, investing in young rocket scientists was important for America's future and getting people to think about interstellar flight was necessary because all cultures need some distant goal or they rot and die.

Welcome to the land of rotting death.

I am no longer a young lady but am an older crone (cackle). I watched optimism in a future space program die. Yes, it died! And I can tell the exact date of its death: a debate at the University Club in Manhattan during the election between Reagan's vision of the future and Carter's vision of the future.

Carter dismayed many people in the space movement because he was always talking about dealing with the energy crisis by cutting back on consumption and living differently. He was, despite a number of good NASA initiatives, basically withdrawing from the notion of a space race. Reagan projected the usual right-wing Macht by loudly declaiming he would flex American military might and rule the earth and defeat our enemies, explore space by ourselves, etc. And all this, while cutting taxes.

William Safire and I were facing down each other. I had few tools in my kit to counter him because liberals don't support space programs for the most part. They always have attacked me for this because 'first you must fix everything on earth,' they would say and I would say, 'That is impossible. And if we don't do this, we will go down with the ship when the earth has problems as it inevitably shall!'

Well, Safire was all excited about the possibility of developing the Star Wars system which was barely past the 'written on a napkin' stage. Not that this mattered much, Reagan's tax cut program was still on the napkin stage, too. The infamous Laffer curve business.

Russia was romping around the world, sticking their ass into every possible quagmire they could find as we retreated from these very same quagmires. Reagan was representing the military/industrial complex that was hurting from post-Vietnam war cuts. The joke was, we were going to cut taxes and raise military spending, see? And all would be well, no deficits. A lot of the people wanting a viable space program were scared of this Russian expansion into mostly third world countries. They thought we would all end up commie or dead, a terrible thing for them.

Well, I said back then, that day, 'Any system we create to neutralize Russian missiles will simply be countered at less cost by changing the way the missiles are launched. Such as launching many dummy missiles before the ones with the warheads are launched.'

Safire gloated, he suggested that the window of opportunity when Russia still hasn't made these missiles, we could launch a sneak attack and destroy them! I was agast.

Um, that was a war crime. The charge we had against the Japanese was just that: they launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor! Well, we can plainly see, the right wing's belief that it is OK to launch sneak attacks is now our policy. Namely, we gave ourselves the right to do this under Bush Jr.

On top of everything, back in that debate in 1979, I was upset to see my side of the argument was failing to gain any traction. People desperately wanted to believe that we could cut taxes, grow the military budget and have a very big space program all at the same time! I understood the need to bribe the voters to choose someone who is going to do multiple things, all of which clash with each other. But for people like Safire to fall for this, he, unlike me, is a heavily published bloviator in the mainstream!

Many of the people there that day thought the space colonization movement would be funded alongside the militarization of space movement. I warned everyone, the military would eat up everything because it is a historically corrupt organization more interested in feeding executives interested in playing golf and buying fancy houses, not exploring space or even more significantly, protecting America (as we see today, like on 9/11, they did virtually nothing!).

I lost that debate because people wanted to live on the Good Ship Lollipop and not in reality land. Now enough years has passed and everything I warned about has come true. Cassandra wasn't appreciated nor am I. But alas, the habit of cutting taxes and not balancing budgets has destroyed our economy. The habit of trying to control the whole planet and all of space via military power is collapsing in defeat after defeat as even virtually unarmed peasants pull us into the mud and strangle us.

The lust to put Russia in its place has totally collapsed and now we must go to them for help, just to keep a toe dipped in space, we are relying on them bailing us out! Instead of many generations of rocket scientists working towards a distant but useful goal, we have a much smaller group of scientists trying to make rockets that can take down rockets while we can't put even a monkey into space? And the sea of red ink means we have no future in space. The day the Chinese cut our loans, we die.

We can't do squat. Even now, if we stop all our wars and began to live within our means, we have no money for a real space program that is about humans traveling to Mars and beyond. Griffith, when he was tapped to lead NASA, thought he was going to get funding to do all sorts of great things. Instead, he is there to stop scientists from studying the planet earth or talking about stopping the militarization of space.

I explained back in 1979, if we militarize space, Russia (and China) would match us and this would destabilize alliances on earth and cause all sorts of really bad problems which is why we had to negotiates SALT treaties and sign the Peaceful Uses of Space Treaty at the UN. I always supported and still do support, international initiatives such as the one started by Jimmy Carter with the Skylab/Soyuz experience. Even as Russia invaded Afghanistan, the need to work with and not against the Russians still existed so far as space was concerned.

As we invade various countries, the rest of the world still works with us on space programs. But the fly in the ointment here is financial: we can't afford a space program while funding floundering invasions. Imagine NASA with a $500 billion dollar budget! The mind reels!

Instead, the feeble programs we see today barely limp along and thanks to privatization, it is far more costly than before while producing less and less and worse, the mind of the public as well as the government, is elsewhere. Very few are thinking about it anymore. The dying interest in all things to do with space is very obvious to me: over the years, the desire to play fantasy rather than doing hard science has been growing in our culture.

Science Fiction books are waning and magic/fantasy books are growing in number. Gaming is mostly fantasy, not science fiction in nature. The rocket scientist is no longer held in high esteem and many in the liberal community consider a rocket scientist to be a mad scientist out to destroy the world and unfortunately, this is rather close to the truth thanks to the constant flow of funds into the Star Wars system which is all about WWIII, not exploring the universe.

It is worse: the American system relies entirely on young people taking a terrible chance with their futures and investing (and paying for) their own training in the various sciences that make up the rocket building fields. If one makes the wrong choices, one has no future and tons of debts to pay off. I saw this firsthand with a number of very bright young scientists who wanted to build interstellar rockets and work on the various fields and theories required to plan for this future.

They ended up jobless! Most changed their fields of endeavor but the tragedy is, they were needed in their theoretical fields if we expect to have a future in space! Requiring individuals to plan for the far future without any security that they will be protected and funded, is lunacy. Which is why no sane student will take a chance at this anymore! Meanwhile, in China and now in Russia, the state insures students in certain fields like these are protected and pulled into the system.

So America's space program limps on, dependent upon other nations producing scientists which we then hire. The nurturing of our own citizens in this field is faltering. Anyone looking into the backgrounds of students in many space-related fields including laser technology, etc, sees an army of foreign students!

This latest news about how we must go to Russia for our space program, is most disheartening. A number of newly-rich computer-based enterprise moguls have tried to create a private manned space program, for example. They can create some exciting prototypes but turning this into a money making venture without tapping the wealth of the state is proving to be nearly impossible. Unlike sending up simple satellites, the expenses of manned space flight are very high.

But not impossibly high. Only if we are also spending money, like Russia so ruinously did from 1976-1989, trying to oppress angry peasants in distant lands or hold down all of Eastern Europe in the face of powerful anti-Soviet sentiment, do we go bankrupt. And even if we totally kill NASA and end attempts at exploring space, we will still go bankrupt.

Because our military is eating up all the budget, relentlessly. As we see this week with wars spreading like wildfire.

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Comet McNaught Will Light Up At Sunrise And Sunset

Elaine Meinel Supkis

A new comet has appeared on the horizon. Comet McNaught just may be one of the biggest celestial events in a long time, we don't know. It bears close watching.

&hearts Because the comet has been faint up to now, the public hasn't heard much exciting news bulletins about this.

The brightest comet in decades is unexpectedly now visible. The most optimistic predictions have Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1) shortly becoming one of the brightest comets of the past century. For the next few days, its short tail and bright coma can be spotted with the unaided eye close to the Sun and near the horizon in both evening and morning skies.

So, it rises and sets with the sun? Doesn't this mean it is flying through the planetary plane? Namely, it isn't falling from other orientations but rather will fly past the orbits of the planets? Ones that do this usually disintegrate if it gets yanked around by the gravity pools of various planets. &hearts Just like we saw so spectacularly in 1994 when Shoemaker-Levy was torn to pieces before slamming into Jupiter.

I remember the debate about comets. Many astronomers thought they were made of ice. When this one broke apart and then created gigantic disturbances and explosive reactions when it hit Jupiter, the snowball theory fell apart, too. Since then, probes have shown us, comets are really very old material from the beginning of the universe and are made of all sorts of minerals, actually, we know very little about them because I suspect, they are all sorts of stuff, space junk. Part of the envelope around our little star. And I also suspect this stuff is part of the globular cluster that our star was part of long before it came close to the Milky Way.

Ergo: comets are important things to study. On top of this scientific interest, there is the need for self-preservation: these things are terribly dangerous and can wipe us out! So we have to always scan the heavens and our space programs should have a strong element of work towards deali with the possibility of a planetary impact.

Years ago, a movie was made about this and of course, showed the USA as the saviors of the earth while grateful people in third world countries applauded us. I wish this could be this way.

&hearts I believe this is the same comet in 2005:

Comet McNaught in that day has been positioned in lower south west evening skies in the constellation of Capricornus. The comet has a dimmed coma with a brightness of about 11th magnitude and thin tail stretched toward south east. It's estimated that the comet will move to north east, and brightened about 10th magnitude in Jan from Mar 2006.

I remember comet Neat which came galloping out of the Pegasus quadrant. &hearts Click here to download the very interesting path this comet took as it brushed by the sun. Astronomers were very surprised to see the sun blast out three times, big coronal ejections that nearly enfolded Neat at one point. We still don't understand what happened back then. Some comets plow into the sun. Considering how small they are, it is interesting how much they disturb the sun just like a comet much smaller than the moon, caused a great deal of disturbance on the biggest of the gas giants.

&hearts Astronomers still hold, comets are water and methane but they do concede there is rock there, too.

Right now, predictions are that it should be rather bright near its closest to the Sun. But how bright remains open to question. Some are calling for it to be several dozen times brighter than Venus, and others are precting a magnitude no brighter than the North Star. It is really very hard to predict what an unknown comet will do. Comets that come by regularly, we observe and get an idea of what to expect. But this comet has never been seen before. In fact, this is probably the fist and only time that this comet has been by close to the Sun. With an eccentricity currently estimated to be just over 1 it will never again come by. First time comets are notoriously unreliable, and are often a bit dimmer than the ones that have been by a few times. That might seem counterintuitive, since the first time by they should have the most volatiles. But, perhaps impacts, fractures and so forth expose more fresh material in more frequent comets.

We know very little about these mysterious objects. We don't know where they come from, why they appear suddenly or what their dynamics are. Gathering data does help us 'see' them much better and their history of destruction requires us to study them most closely. We can't stop the sun from doing things to us, we can't stop other stars from blasting stuff at us but we can stop comets from destroying our planet. This being a thing that is possible for us means we are responsible to do something.

Until then, enjoy the amazing views at sunrise and sunset. I will try to take pictures but don't really have a good camera right now.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Dark Matter And Galaxies Are All Falling Into Each Other

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As new information pours in, astronomers struggle to jam it all into their present cosmos which seems to be the idea that the universe is flying apart at the seams and all things are racing away from each other even though this is obviously being refuted by everything we are seeing except for red shift data which has to be re-examined, I believe, in light of the fact that all things seem to be falling in to each other, not away.

&hearts Here is a typical example of how every bit of data 'confirms' the notion, the universe is flying apart at every level:

Explanation: This tiny ball provides evidence that the universe will expand forever. Measuring slightly over one tenth of a millimeter, the ball moves toward a smooth plate in response to energy fluctuations in the vacuum of empty space. The attraction is known as the Casimir Effect, named for its discoverer, who, 50 years ago, was trying to understand why fluids like mayonnaise move so slowly. Today, evidence is accumulating that most of the energy density in the universe is in an unknown form dubbed dark energy. The form and genesis of dark energy is almost completely unknown, but postulated as related to vacuum fluctuations similar to the Casimir Effect but generated somehow by space itself. This vast and mysterious dark energy appears to gravitationally repel all matter and hence will likely cause the universe to expand forever. Understanding vacuum fluctuations is on the forefront of research not only to better understand our universe but also for stopping micro-mechanical machine parts from sticking together.

This triumphant certification is belayed by a ton of contrary facts. In today's news is more troubling information that clearly shows, things are not flying apart but are clumping together more and more and everywhere we look, we see galaxies and all gases and matter and stuff and thingies all sliding into each other, relentlessly.

&hearts The 3-D map of dark matter detected via lens distortions is exciting astronomers but they still cling to the present cosmology:

But astronomers will have to resolve discrepancies in the otherwise tight connection between ordinary matter and the dark "stuff".

Concentrations of ordinary matter almost always overlap with concentrations of dark matter - but not absolutely always.

Conversely, the researchers saw that dark matter concentrations sometimes seemed to have no corresponding ordinary matter.

"It's not forbidden, but you get a little uncomfortable because you would think the two should go together," said Dr Linder.

Using the effects of 'lensing' which is the distortion of light by gravity, scientists have made a 3-D map of part of the universe. This shows clearly that dark matter is clumping around galaxy clusters and streams. As per usual, every piece of data showing the elements of all sorts clumping together is touted as justification for the present Cosmic Analysis that the universe is flying apart faster and faster.

I took a glass double dove sculpture and held it over the tile pattern on my kitchen floor and photographed it. The distortions of the 12"x12" grid behind the glass birds can be seen clearly in the body of the birds. Showing the distortions caused by gravity reveals the shape of time and space and to do this, you need to 'see' a grid behind it all: the cosmic reality. Namely, space is warped by objects but we can't see it because it is invisible. Just like we can't see currents in the air unless there is clouds or birds riding thermals. And hot air shimmers and distorts the view of the horizon or even nearby objects thanks to the molecules in our atmosphere.

We can see the atmosphere of Jupiter and the other gas giants because it is very dense and colorful. The density of atmospheric gases distort the view in Venus so greatly, everything probes photographed before disintegrating showed a strange landscape, warped and woofed in all directions. When we look at the giant conglomerations of galaxies, we can clearly see how badly our own view is warped by distortions caused by tremendous gravity and incidentally, the tremendous heat generated by these massive conglomerations distorts, too.

Carlos Frenk commented: "Finding what I would call 'naked' clumps of dark matter where there are no galaxies for me is very strange. All dark matter clumps of sufficient size should have galaxies - if our understanding is correct."

For the moment, no-one is talking about needing to revise cosmological models; but Professor Frenk said everything hinged on the size of these anomalies.

"What would be an enormous puzzle would be to find big, luminous galaxies sitting out there in the middle of nowhere with no dark matter around them. That really would be shocking."

What if the fabric of space is folded? Astronomers have thought of this and science fiction writers have happily seized this notion to enable cross-galactic flights of fancy. When the Big Bang blew up, all sorts of stuff exploded with it. And the force of this explosion was very great. But a general rule of nature seems to be, if things are flying away from each other very fast, they all like to end up clumping together again somehow, this is why free radicals join whoever has a spare slot available in their atomic structure.

Nature doesn't like anarchists any more than governments on earth.

Our universe would have cooled down really fast if everything in the Big Bang petered out by flying away from each other as fast as possible. If, like some fantasies, everything not only flew apart but went faster and faster, why everything would now be dark as night, no? Nothing left. Yet everywhere we look, we see luminosity in big clumps. The greater our perspective, the more they clump!

Indeed, looking into the deep past, we see this clearly only because we can see enough space to see this clumping at work. Namely, when we look at our nearest neighbors within our own clump, we see them as if they are very far apart from each other.

This is due to our perspective: like a photographer taking pictures of a mountain range, he or she can see the shape of mountains in the distance but not the one where he or she stands! Or another way of looking at this: if one stands on a mountain peak, one can see all around but not underfoot.

You can bet, if we see galactic clusters in the far past, we are in one ourselves, right now. This should be an iron rule: all galaxies are trapped in clumps. But more: none of these clumps are circular, they are all in the equivalent of a stream, they flow directionally. Any galaxies on the sides slide down into these streams. I would suggest we are seeing folds in the space/time continuum.

&hearts The difference between big globular clusters and small ones puzzle astronomers.

To the unaided eye this glorious globular cluster has the appearance of a hazy star and was frequently confused with Halley's comet when it drifted through Centaurus in 1986. One of the richest in the Milky Way, Omega Cen contains several million stars, but unlike its southern rival, 47 Tucanae, it has a relatively open structure. Like most galactic globular clusters, the stellar population of Omega Cen identifies it as one of the oldest objects associated with the Milky Way, indeed its age is comparable to that of the Universe itself. The cluster contains a large number of RR Lyrae variable stars which enable its distance to be determined as 17,000 light years.

OK, first we have to clear up one thing: if this globular structure, 47 Tucanae, is as old as the universe, this means it formed soon after the Big Bang. And according to present beliefs, it should be shooting outwards to infinity because it should be drawn towards something that is making the universe fly apart!

Only it isn't. This poor star cluster, probably like the one our own sun formed within billions of years ago, has been sucked into the embrace of the Milky Way's resident black hole complex. And in they fall! For 13 billion years, this star group, 47 Tucanae, has managed to avoid all other stellar objects, truly flying off on its lonesome, but probably for the last 2 to 3 billion years, its happy journey outwards curved inwards as the indentation in the space/time fabric caused by our own galaxy, worked to draw these happy-go-lucky stars into a future of being torn asunder and jammed into the vicinity of other captive stars and ground to dust by the churning galaxy itself.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0612/ngc1097_gabany_f.jpg
&hearts Here is a photograph of a distant mountain range which clearly shows how all galaxies are sucking down all small globular clusters.

A smaller companion seems wrapped in the spiral arms of enigmatic galaxy NGC 1097. This amazingly deep image of the peculiar spiral system, also known as Arp 77, actually combines data from two telescopes, one in the northern and one in the southern hemisphere of planet Earth. The faint details revealed include hints of a mysterious jet emerging toward the top of the view. Seen to be about 42,000 light-years from the larger galaxy's center, the companion galaxy is gravitationally interacting with the spiral and will ultimately merge with it. NGC 1097's center also harbors a massive black hole. NGC 1097 is located about 45 million light-years away in the chemical constellation Fornax.

'Gravitationally interacting' is cute. It makes it sound like equals meeting. Of course, words make pictures in the head and the astronomers who write for APOD know their audience needs to picture things in their heads so why don't they write, 'The much bigger galaxy is in the process of trapping and sucking into its gaping maw, the smaller star cluster.' After all, the image that creates is accurate!

When two galaxies are engaged in coalescing, this is a messy business which lights up the universe as the attending clouds of gases, raw materials, rocks, dirt or whatever enfold each other and as they get crushed and packed in denser and denser, light blazes forth for these create quite a fireworks show. In the old days, astronomers called galaxies engaged in this violent pas-de-deux were called 'active' galaxies. And ones that were simply deforming space and time and waiting for the next customer to stray nearby, were considered to be 'complete' or 'dormant'.

Picturing these things differently means changing one's cosmology. And this is most difficult. The idea that all things are falling into each other is violently at odds with the idea that things are moving away. The idea that the things we see moving away are doing so because they are the only things we really can see since all we see is the past when we photograph the cosmos, we are like passengers on a ship photographing the distant shore but unable to see the iceberg looming ahead since we are sitting in the back of the Titanic and not the front.

&hearts The riddle of why some globular clusters have black holes but not others is a puzzle that illuminates a paradox as to how galaxies are created.

What has astonished the scientists is how quickly the black hole was found.

"We were preparing for a long, systematic search of thousands of globular clusters with the hope of finding just one black hole," said Dr Maccarone. "But bingo, we found one as soon as we started the search. It was only the second globular cluster we looked at."

The black hole is located in a globular cluster associated with a galaxy named NGC 4472, some 55 million light-years away.

Globular clusters are among the oldest structures in the Universe. They contain thousands to millions of stars packed into a region of space just a few tens of light-years across.

These high densities should lead to frequent interactions and even collisions; and some models have suggested that large black holes - several hundred times the mass of our Sun - could develop in the densest inner regions of clusters.

Other simulations, however, predict that such gravitational interplay would probably eject most or all of the black holes that form in such an environment.

Astronomers have to start out with assumptions and as data pours in, they have to then adjust these assumptions. So it is here: globular clusters have black holes. If, when looking, the very first ones show this, then one has to suspect the clusters without black holes are unusual or are something else and should have another name.

The greatest gravitators, the biggest beasts in the universe are the giant globular clusters like&hearts M 87, aka, the Great Attractor:which incidentally, illustrates what I have been saying about how we can see the distant shore from our ship, the Earth, but can't see ahead, it being blocked by our own galaxy. I looked at various articles about the Great Attractor over the years and very seldom do they talk about our fate: to be sucked down into that monster and destroyed.

A certain skittishness is understandable. This is why my parents adamantly refused to talk about ultimate cosmology with me at any time, they could contemplate all sorts of things but not this sector of our universe being folded into a massive object and destroyed. The unsettling psychology of this is probably why astronomers are clinging to the 'flying apart as fast as possible' mythology.

Indeed, all our religions are attempts at controlling the inclinations of Nature and avoiding death. We really want eternity. It is our lodestar. To exist forever and ever. Our little star cluster could have sailed on for eons if it hadn't been trapped by the Milky Way! And of course, the idea of this entrapment is very scary---I would suggest, we are entirely unable to appreciate this!

&hearts And here is another illustration of the adege, 'The more we know, the less we understand.'

The results largely matched energy fluctuations seen in Earth-bound fluid turbulence, making this the first "definitive" detection of space turbulence, said Melvyn Goldstein of Goddard Space Flight Center. He has worked on previous studies that gave hints of the same similarity.

That the solar wind behaves like the cream swirling in your coffee is surprising, since the low-density solar wind has almost no viscosity--an important component in fluid turbulence.

"For turbulence to develop in space, there must be some physical processes that can replace the role of viscosity," Narita says.

This viscosity replacement may be some complicated electromagnetic interaction between the solar wind's ionized particles. Goldstein says much of the current work is aimed at understanding how this plasma behaves in relation to the nearby magnetic fields.

Better characterization of solar wind turbulence could help scientists predict space weather, which affects the radiation level for astronauts and spacecraft, Narita says.

As we develop tools and equipment that helps us 'see' things that are invisible to human eyes, we are amazed by the complexity and dynamics of what appears to be empty space to the naked eye. Many years ago, I explained to audiences at Science Fiction Conventions, we can never travel at the speed of light or even a great fraction of it simply because space is too crowded with stuff. Comets approaching the sun disintegrate, for example.

Our space craft move at a dottering pace which is why they don't tear themselves apart. If one moves slowly enough, there is little danger. But this means trips to even nearby planets takes years. So far, I see no possible way around this reality.

One thing seems pretty certain: all energy systems create turbulence. And the bigger the system, the more they create turbulence and there seems to be plenty of material to turbo up. Just 30 years ago, astronomers still thought space was pretty empty (despite me saying otherwise, heh). Today, they can plainly see, it isn't and understanding the complexity of all this is a wonderful business and I hope some astronomers kick away the present word-picture paintings so painfully drawn and try new, different words to describe all this and then maybe we can understand our fates, our future.

What fun!

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Sun Predicted To Be More Active Than Last 400 Years

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Right on the heels of my posting yesterday how Mother Nature loves mirrors, another example of this pops into the news! In this case, the solar sun spot cycle mirrors the earth's geomagnetic indices! With a mysterious five to ten year lag! No one has any idea how this works or why it works this way!

&hearts The last five solar cycles really battered us and the next one is proposed to be a doozy.

Dec. 21, 2006: Evidence is mounting: the next solar cycle is going to be a big one.

Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 "looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. He and colleague Robert Wilson presented this conclusion last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Ulimately, the earth heats up because the sun heats us up. The mix of gases in our atmosphere then determines how much is captured and kept within our ecosphere. Ski resort owners should just give up if they are in the lower elevations. There will be no reliable winters for the next ten years at least.

The sun definitely cycles. Like all things in nature, it isn't inert but rather has periods of gathering strength and then releasing of energy. Astronomers and geologists now believe the Earth was once locked in ice billions of years ago. This was surmised to be caused by the sun not 'shining' as much light as today. The star wasn't as active, in other words. Then, mysteriously, it 'fired up' and began to warm up the planet about 1.3 billion years ago and life began on earth in ernest.

Another mystery! I love these mysteries! In general, cycles tend to be part of something bigger than themselves, seeing how they connect is part of the joy of being an investigator. I am not an astronomer or even a scientist, I was born and raised in observatories...literally. I grew up with this community. I am not so hot with the numbers thing but I 'see' things all the time, it is a gift Pegasus gave me along with a few million volts of pure energy on several occasions.

Our sun is an old star. It has existed for one quarter of the length of Time itself, since the Big Bang. The fact that we are still way outside of the core of the Milky Way has convinced me many years ago that the sun is part of another, much smaller galaxy that fell into the Milky Way since it is an IRON LAW of Nature that ALL galaxies fall into ALL other galaxies. (Clearing my throat here) Whatever mathematical formula one arrives as to explain this reality, I would be in awe of the scientist able to do this. I always thought it was very amusing for Mother Nature to create the potential for all things to be expressed as numbers but that takes us back into religion and why the universe can be mirrored as numbers...

What causes stars to be born and to shine? Astronomers say, they form out of basically loose stuff that gets 'compressed'. &hearts We see stars forming not too far off from us here in this arm of the Milky Way, such as in the Orion constellation area where we see great clouds and sheets of 'non-shining' stuff, this is where the famous Horsehead nebula resides.

The nebulosity of the Horsehead is believed to be excited by the bright star Sigma Orionis, which is located above the top of the image. Just off the left side of the image is the bright star Zeta Orionis, which is the easternmost of the three stars that form Orion's belt. Zeta Orionis is a foreground star, and is not related to the nebula. The streaks in the nebulosity that extend above the Horsehead are likely due to magnetic fields within the nebula. Close study reveals that many more stars are visible in the top half of the image. Stars in the lower half of the image are obscured by a dark cloud of hydrogen gas

&hearts Orion is part of 'our' neighborhood, it is also part of something we are smack dab in the middle of, ourselves:

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.

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!

&hearts Gould's Belt is around 20 degrees of the galactic plane of the Milky Way.

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.

Brilliant, hot, white suns of super-duper size form out of all that 'stuff' that is the envelope of the older, yellow stars. A classic way to detect a smaller galaxy merging with a bigger one is, the new star formation areas are at an angle to each other just like our own mini-galaxy which I will call the Orion Galaxy since the starmaking in that section is most intense right now.

When our happy little sun fell towards the Milky Way, the neighborhood became hotter, literally. And the sun became more active, too. Now we are in the grip of greater tidal forces, doubled. And between them, our sun shines quite actively. The earth heated up and the ice melted and life teemed across the surface. The outside forces working on our sun aren't even, there is obviously some pulsation involved over long cycles. We can't see them all..yet. But with the new probes, we see more and more.

Even with our current state of knowledge, dating eons-old events in the Galaxy is fraught with difficulty. To be certain by better than a factor of two is to do well. That said, the history of Gould’s belt as currently envisioned is as follows. Perhaps more so than today, the belt in the past comprised a sheet of discrete clouds of gas mingled with stars. Some 30 million years ago an event triggered a burst of star formation at the position of the Per OB3 association [also refered as 'Alpha Per group' -- WebEd.]. This could have been the passage of the last spiral density wave through the area, the collision of a high-velocity cloud falling back through the galactic plane, or the latest oscillation of the belt through the galactic midplane. Any such mechanism would have sufficiently compressed the affected molecular clouds comprising the belt to initiate star birth.

Note the quesiness of this passage. Thinking of our sun as part of a smaller galaxy that is now being ripped apart by the Milky Way is scary. So there is a lot of evasion in the thinking of astronomers. They might break out of this and reconsider things. I think it is neat, we came here from somewhere else! This makes our journey through the cosmos most interesting. We have to consider this: we are probably a small piece of the Big Bang that shot outwards in a long trajectory, we sailed through the cosmos for around 8 billion years before we began to close in on the Milky Way that reeled us in like a fisherman brings in the trout.

&hearts Click here to read the full PDF document concerning theh Gould Belt and how pulses from it sends meteorites and such flying into our own solar system, creating extinction events.

Note that the asteroids, meteorites and comets menacing us aren't coming from the Milky Way but are from our own galaxy that is still being pulled relentlessly into the Milky Way's orb! This means 'local' events are from our own cosmos and not part of the larger cosmos of the much bigger galaxy that has captured us. How all this affects the sun is still to be seen. All I know is, our sun isn't all that stable anymore and our planet, one of the livelier ones in this sector of creation, mirrors some of this...

Culture of Life News Main Page

Dark Matter And The Curved Universe

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Dark matter doesn't matter unless it is a stand-in for something else. Namely, since we can't see the biggest forces pulling millions and millions of galaxies into nothingness, maybe we are seeing what happens if everything is flowing back towards the Big Bang? An interesting mindgame worth playing. (Thanks for bringing this up, JSmith!)

&hearts So, not only are smaller star systems falling into the gravity pools of larger galaxies and galaxies are colliding and merging with each other all over kingdom come but galactic CLUSTERS are slamming into each other, too?

Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter.

This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the "bullet cluster." This cluster was formed after the collision of two large clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the Big Bang. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.; Lensing Map: NASA/STScI; ESO WFI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.)

"This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it is stronger on intergalactic scales than predicted by Newton and Einstein, removing the need for dark matter. However, such theories cannot explain the observed effects of this collision.

OK, a mere 'collision' of two streams of galaxies is nearly as big as the Big Bang? I looked at the data and it is a big lighting up of a lot of something! But the question really is, what the hell drew not just one stream of millions of galaxies but two streams, into one spot? And they heated up everything but didn't dissolve? And where the hell are they going, anyway? Eh?

None of this makes sense even with dark matter thrown in. Is everything on the same plane and streaming towards the same point? Huh? Yes? and what is this 'point'? Is is singular? A singularity that is a mirror of the original Big Bang? Why does Nature love circles, rebirths, why does She adore pulling things together and then blowing them up again?

My own feeble mind suspects She has Her usual iron rules concerning all this. She hates eternity and forever. When She was trapped in Eternity, She BLEW UP. Thinking about all this as mythology or putting a human face on all this makes it much easier to think about the meanings of all the data that is flowing here.

&hearts The problem isn't the existence of 'dark matter' but explaining why everything is flowing in 'rivers' and 'clusters' and 'clumping' and other odd things which shouldn't be possible in an expanding universe.

Dark Matter Exists
Sean at 11:52 am, August 21st, 2006

The great accomplishment of late-twentieth-century cosmology was putting together a complete inventory of the universe. We can tell a story that fits all the known data, in which ordinary matter (every particle ever detected in any experiment) constitutes only about 5% of the energy of the universe, with 25% being dark matter and 70% being dark energy. The challenge for early-twenty-first-century cosmology will actually be to understand the nature of these mysterious dark components. A beautiful new result illuminating (if you will) the dark matter in galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 is an important step in this direction. (Here’s the press release, and an article in the Chandra Chronicles.)

A prerequisite to understanding the dark sector is to make sure we are on the right track. Can we be sure that we haven’t been fooled into believing in dark matter and dark energy?

It is certainly a mirror image that we can't see the Big Bang but it is shrouded and veiled in Darkness. There are many theories about this. But then, the Great Attractor and this other end of the Universe where the Bullet galaxies collided, the force at work is equally occulted. We can't see it, we can only sense it.

&hearts Here are some postings from NASA concerning our half of the Universe, concerning the Great Attractor.

Galaxies dot the sky like jewels in the direction of a mass so large it is known simply as the Great Attractor. The galaxies pictured above are part of a cluster of galaxies called ACO 3627 near the center of the Great Attractor. Previously, this cluster of galaxies, also known as the Norma Cluster, was largely unstudied because dust in the disk of our own Galaxy obscured much of its light. The Great Attractor is a diffuse mass concentration fully 250 million light-years away, but so large it pulls our own Milky Way Galaxy and millions of others galaxies towards it. Many of the galaxies in ACO 3627 are slowly heading towards collisions with each other.

We aren't just moving towards this thing, we are flowing 'in a river' towards it just like we see all over the Universe, when we look around us, we see streams of galaxies flowing in rivers! Because of this, we must assume they see us the exact same way. The odds of there being some entities in any of these other galaxies watching us is actually rather high since the number of stars in these millions of galaxies are in the billions per galaxy if we consider the larger ones! Wave hello to them! Hi.

I bet if we made contact with them, they would immediately run a trade surplus with us and we would have to ask them for loans. In zrrrixles.

&hearts Here is the Great River of Galaxies yet again.

This mass migration includes the Local Group, the Virgo Cluster, the Hydra--Centaurus Supercluster, and other groups and clusters for a distance of at least 60 Mpc up and downstream from us. It is as if a great river of galaxies (including our own) is flowing with a swift current of 600 km/s toward Centaurus.

Location of the Great Attractor

Calculations indicate that ~1016 solar masses concentrated 65 Mpc away in the direction of Centaurus would account for this. This mass concentration has been dubbed the Great Attractor. Detailed investigation of that region of the sky (see adjacent image of the galaxy cluster Abell 3627) finds 10 times too little visible matter to account for this flow, again implying a dominant gravitational role for unseen or dark matter. Thus, the Great Attractor is certainly there (because we see its gravitational influence), but the major portion of the mass that must be there cannot be seen in our telescopes.

It really irks me that we can't see any of this. And this makes me very suspicious. Why would It be Dark? Who turned off the lights? Seeing all this with childish eyes makes one ask interesting questions. Nature, we know for a fact, loves mirror images. She loves to have dualities, She is addicted to opposites. The very fundamentals of Her schemes involve polarizations.

So why not here? Eh? Heh.

Are those distant galaxies seeming to be moving in giant rivers away from us and towards 'It' really disappearing into nothingness? Or are we just unable to see them because they are circling around the other side of Creation and we will suddenly 'see' them when we slam into them????

&hearts Here is a PDF of a paper discussing the 'rarity' of the Bullet galaxies colliding.

I remember when the first pictures of two galaxies colliding were obvious when seen by the new Hubble telescope. I said back then, 'If this is true, this means ALL galaxies are colliding!' And I was right. We are all on collision courses with each other and something we can sense but not see! Since this is universal this means it is one of Nature's beloved 'iron clad laws.' And being that, it means it has a shape to it, it is not 'flying apart at the seams forever' because She hates this idea. Comes from being a mother and all that.

&hearts Here is a movie comparing two galactic clusters that have tremendous disturbances in their forces and thus are lighting up the cosmos around themselves.

This sequence compares the physical size of the cavities found in MS 0735.6+7421 and the Perseus cluster, another well-known galaxy cluster with cavities. These two clusters are at very different distances -- Perseus is about 250 million light years away and MS 0735 is almost three billion light years away. To make a direct size comparison, the Perseus cluster is shrunk to simulate its appearance at the farther distance of MS 0735. From this comparison, it is obvious that the cavities in MS 0735 are much larger than those found in Perseus.

Do note the shape of both of these huge cluster's centers. Each one has a mirror polar opposite. There is this VOID in the center of each of these things. What if this is the model of the Big Bang? And we are riding on the outer surface of one of the twin bubbles? If we go through Nature's creations here on our tiny planet, we see the same impulse: things mimic each other, they mirror themselves outrageously which is why we have two arms, two legs, two eyes, etc. We have one heart and this displacement interfaces with other forces within and without our bodies. Trees like to be symetrical, sea shells are symetrical, the planet is symetrical with a north pole and a south pole. The Moon is round, too and so is our sun! And so on.

So I propose, the Universe is also symetrical. And like all systems we see, it is compact and tends to curve. Mother Nature isn't masculine, She likes round things. Curvaceous. Repeticious. Suspicious, too, for that matter.

And if there is 'dark matter' you can bet there is 'white matter' which we can't see...yet.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Were The Earliest Stars Already Black Holes?

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Astronomers continue to try to fit new data into the presuppositions already held concerning how the universe formed 13+billion years ago right after the Big Bang. The most recent data shows the earliest ‘stars’ were too ‘big’ to be stars as we know them from studying events that are closer in time.

&hearts The earliest stars as black holes makes a lot of sense to me.

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 18 December 2006

Astronomers might have seen the very first stars in the universe. If so, these are incredible stars, some 1,000 times as massive as the Sun.

The alternative is just as interesting: The objects might be early black holes consuming gas voraciously and spitting out radiation like crazy as nascent galaxies form.

‘Consuming gas and spitting out radiation’...this means the gravity pools of these ‘first whatevers’ attracted anything in their vicinity and as these gases were compacted, the atoms were split and this created ‘radiation.’ The interesting question here is, how many of these ‘things’ were there and does this number correspond with the number of galaxies we see, say, a billion years old instead of 13 billion years old.

If galaxies are merging with each other----and we see this happening all around us right now---then there would be far fewer galaxies compared to the number of these earliest black holes. If we are still rapildly expaning, no galaxies would have even the slightest possibility of merging with any others so the question is, are we at the midpoint where galaxies can’t fly further apart, or we could be flying faster apart because some mysteriious force is attracting us or we could be falling towards the Great Attractor.

There is no easy answer to all this but there is rational thoughts that are possible. The idea that something is forcing everything apart is very out dated and sticks around only because of the natural tendency of people to cling to previous ideas and there has to be some explanation about the way light is warped by time and space and making up some mysterious force saves one from having to think we are really falling kind of backwards, so to speak.

A little math therefore shows that these newfound objects are indeed the infants of the universe. But what are they? If they are stars, they are about 10 times more massive than theories suggest the first stars would have been.

The mysterious objects are in clusters. If they are each stars, then the clusters might be the first mini-galaxies. And if so, each apparently has a mass that's less than a million suns. Our Milky Way, by contrast, holds the mass of about 100 billion suns and is thought to have been built up by mergers of smaller galaxies—perhaps like those the astronomers now think they might be seeing.

Everywhere we look in the past, all celestial objects are in clusters. I would suspect a law of nature would be, ‘After the Big Bang, all things will form clusters’. People have devised all sorts of mathematical models for nature and the reliance on these formulae is the foundation of science. But before one comes up with these scripts, they first have to have an ideological mental framework that sets the stage for understanding the math which is basically an attempt to quantify nature’s functions.

She has this tendency to set iron rules that simply can’t be violated. Learning these rules and using them for our own ends has been the quest of all humans since we first picked up a stick or stone and threw them. The first human to take a bone and scratch onto it the number of days for the moon to wax and then wane was someone quantifying nature. Early humans were puzzled by women bleeding every month when they were not with child or nursing a child. Tallying the moon’s phases and then setting this within the idea of menstral periods was an intellectual feat. Indeed, the ancient term for female bleeding comes from the word for ‘moon.’

All of nature is full of such influences and subtilties. For thousands of years, early astronomers and others universally called the beginnings of our existence in the deepest pasts, a time of Chaos. Astronomers see the past based on this ancient grid that is deep within our culture. Now that we get some data coming from that very time period, the challenge of understanding it is made harder by the fact this grid exists.

From the article:

"There's ongoing debate about what the first objects were and how galaxies formed," said Harvey Moseley of Goddard, a co-author on the new papers.

Some think our galaxy and other large galaxies grew through mergers. One recent study questioned that notion, however.

How much force did the Big Bang have? The assumption right now is, the force was so great, it blew apart everything and we are still in the grip of this trajectory only few astronomers want to view this as a ‘trajectory’ for this means what goes ‘up’...must come ‘down’. When one looks at all the laws of nature, something becomes very clear: there is no infinity. Even stasis isn’t eternal. The worship of ‘eternity’ and why all religions call upon this force is due to humans wanting stasis. The dynamism of nature is frightening because it all has this built-in trajectory leading to mergers and death.

Galaxies merge. Stars die. Black holes suck down everything they can. Things become destabilized and blow up. Matter degrades over time. When things merge, they change and cease to be what they were before. Everything ages. Entropy.

So how could our galaxy be, relative to all previous things we see from the past, be ‘speeding up’ if it is ‘flying away’? Absent some accelerating action, we should be slowing down unless we are...falling. Namely, we must be on the ‘falling back to earth’ phase. This is, like all things in nature, a trajectory. We can’t be flying towards some ‘attractor’ unless it is some monster black hole object that is attracting a lot more than our lonely, little galaxy.

Why would there be just one thing ‘pulling’ on us, making us move faster and faster while not doing that to all other things? And if ALL galaxies are moving towards some mysterious thingie that is making them accelerate, this would mean this giant thingie is all over creation and is bigger than the entire universe in size! And then it ceases to be anything at all but makes our universe into this big balloon whereby the balloon is a force, itself?

I cannot accept this visualization. If astronomers cannot put into simple mind-pictures, what is going on, this means they messed up. Picturing black holes which are super-dense and grow in size as the assimulate more and more mass, is logical and easy. When first proposed, many astronomers rejected this only due to inertia within their own brains.

But this new idea that we are flying apart faster and faster flies in the face of Nature herself. Either we are falling into something denser than we are or we are propelling ourselves forwards due to the energy of the Big Bang.

If that were so, no small galaxies would be falling towards us. They should have shot past us long ago and been out of here, flying madly in a straight line towards infinity, faster and faster if there is this ‘mysterious force’ attracting them!

But they aren’t attracted to some distant, mysterious force, they are attracted to our bigger galaxy! And we have proof a number of these smaller galaxies have also been attracted to our galaxy and this would be utterly impossible if they were individually flying straight outwards!

Perhaps the first eons, say the first 2 billion years, smaller galaxies might have fallen into bigger ones but the ones like the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds certainly would not be anywhere near our galaxy 11 billion years later! And all the dirt our galaxy is vacuuming up even now, wouldn’t be here if space were expanding. Nature is logical, she loves laws and strictly adheres to them and she hates a vacuum. And infinity. And eternity.

We are coming into Christmas where the Christians celebrate the 'birth' of a human that died, sprang out of his grave and then flew to the Heavens to Life Forever. Humans want desperately to believe in infinite, death-defying gods! The ancient Egyptians build all sorts of amaz