Space News

WMAP Shows Big Bang Better

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The WMAP survey of the universe has been examined by astronomers who now say the initial expansion of the cosmos happened in a microsecond, a tremendous speed, shooting out several dozen lightyears in a flash. Now they have a nifty map showing how the universe is shaped only it leaves out a vital fact: galaxies are, TODAY, falling TOWARDS each other, not away!

Astronomical Photo of the Day:

The Universe is expanding gradually now. But its initial expansion was almost impossibly rapid as it likely grew from quantum scale fluctuations in a trillionth of a second. In fact, this cosmological scenario, known as Inflation, is now reported to be further quantified by an analysis of three years of data from the WMAP spacecraft. WMAP's instruments detect the cosmic microwave background radiation - the afterglow light from the early Universe. WMAP's amazing success in exploring the first trillionth of a second and favoring specific inflationary scenarios lies in its ability to make unprecedented, precise measurements of the properties of the microwave background. The subtle properties are distilled from conditions in the early Universe and related to its first moments of existence. Schematically, this diagram traces the 13.7 billion year (plus a trillionth of a second ...) history of the Universe from the quantum scale to the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, and WMAP.

Like an ant at the bottom of the well looking up to the heavens at night, so we sit here and gaze into the deep past and think the universe is basically flat. I have posted a lot on this topic because it really bothers me a lot. All astronomers agree our own galaxy is sucking in other star systems, we see more and more details about this every year as we get a better view of what is going on here.

We now realize we are sliding towards Andromeda which is further away. We can see, in the past, that galaxies all over the place are playing ring a round the black hole with each other which most often ends with a merger as more and more star systems spiral down, YES, DOWN into ever larger gravitational vortexes!

So look at the official drawing above, my crude sketch or view the professional one at the APOD site. They show the universe as having only one, uniform curve! Huh? Not only that, they coyly let the two dimensional tube they drew suddenly curve outwards at the end representing "now".

Back to the ant in the well. The top of the well looks tiny and the bottom, where the ant is, huge. But what if the well tapers down in size to the ant below? It would still look big at the bottom!

We have to always remember we are, time-wise, stuck in the here and now and this limits our ability to understand space and time which is not only vast but also, for the most part, invisible. So we make many assumptions.

In other words, the minute one draws a picture of FUTURE galaxy collisions which all astronomers now agree WILL happen, one sees that the little picture at the official NASA site is seriously flawed. Namely, the warping of space/time is getting very seriously out of whack due to the fact that the original imputus of the Big Bang is now overwhelmed by the increasingly seriously deep black hole gravitational pools which are so gigantic, they are sucking down all galaxies.

All. Every one of them.

This means that we are not accelerating further and further apart, this is impossible if we are falling inwards! The present way for the ants in the well to explain this is to pretend this accelerating activity is making the super big black holes like the Great Attractor move further and further away from other monster black holes, there are only a handful of them, you know, and therefore, we are still "expanding" outwards.

I posit that this is simply impossible. I don't have all the data at hand to prove my point to beyond no doubt but rational thinking forces me to state the present dogma is totally wrong and as scientists attempt to stay within the box, they have to twist facts more and more.

Pretending this acceleration we are seeing is moving outwards is an asumption based on exactly nothing! Once one throws this out, the facts are, space and time are now moving in swirls, NO galaxy is moving in a straight line, so to speak, nor even a slightly curved on like the graph at APOD shows. Since this movement can only be detected by checking the relative position of everything to everything else and since we ants have a very short life cycle and our tiny ant colony has been around only for a very short time period, we can't simply wait a while and check to see where everything is relative to everything else, we can only look into the past and then assume many things.

As our own solar system relentlessly moves around the black hole at the center of our galaxy, we have to think, isn't is bizarre that our star and planets are way out at the outer edge of this galaxy system? Were we always there? Or were we "captured" a couple of billion years ago and in a couple more, end up compressed in the dark heart of the Milky Way?

If you look at other spiral arm galaxies, they sure do look like giant drains! With everything spiralling inwards. And the Giganticus Galaxies, the real monster sized ones that are sucking down, quite obiviously, galaxies bigger than ours, they have no spiral arms! They are round. We still don't understand why, considering that they, too, are sucking in stuff.

The future is as opaque as the bottom of our well.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Space/Time IV

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

When I was struck by lightning the first time, I fell into a paradoxical universe which I call "the Outer Darkness" but it did have something, a juncture of where all opposites exist simultaneously in the same place at the same time. I couldn't figure out where I fit in this so I fled and started breathing again. I know how Schroedinger's cat feels in that box. It isn't pretty.

From the Register:

A quantum computer at a US University has solved a computational problem without running a program. Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gleaned the answer to an algorithm by combining quantum computation and quantum interrogation (a technique that makes use of wave-particle duality to search a region of space without actually entering that region) in an optical-based quantum computer through a process called "counterfactual computation".

Tremendous power exists where the two worlds intersect, where matter and antimatter cross, where, well, this is what lightning is all about, too. Having been unified with the positive and negative polarity of a strike, I assure you, there is another place that isn't this place at all nor is it the reverse, it is a unifying oneness which results in a pretty powerful explosion.

As scientists used computers to track and figure out the streams of information, the faster the computational abilities, the closer we get to "seeing" this sort of event horizon which incidentally is very much what the surface of a black hole is also about. Common sense logic argues against a paradoxical universe but Mother Nature loves paradoxes, you might as well name Schroedinger's Box "Pandora".

Light itself, the most fleet of foot item in the universe, is a paradox. It is a wave that exists in several time realities while at the same time, it is a particle that has its own existence but doesn't reveal itself except in death, when it betrays itself by striking something and even then, it retains itself in various ways including being incorporated inside of another entity only to be reexpressesd in the form of new energy such as the photons that hit the plants and animals and was "eaten" only to be released again, half a billion years later in the form of energy that powers a lightbulb which produces photon units yet again! It is part of what the unity of nature is all about.

Utilising two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat's team succeeded in counterfactually searching a four-element database using Grover's quantum search algorithm. "By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm," said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper. "We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a 'chained Zeno' effect."

Through clever use of beam splitters and both constructive and destructive interference, the researchers can put each photon in a superposition of taking two paths. Although a photon can occupy multiple places simultaneously, it can only make an actual appearance at one location. Its presence defines its path, and that can, in a very strange way, negate the need for the search algorithm to run.

I bet this is the way bee or ant brains work. They have no brains yet they "think" individually and collectively. They barely have anything approaching a nervous system yet they think as exquisitely as a computer doing alogrithims in the fashion described here.

Ants and bees constantly have to make "choices" like, whether or not to sting me when I walk by the bee hive. I know they are "thinking" because the bees will fly around me, move up and down and signal with their wings, their intentions. When they are happy with me, they make a very faint buzz but if something angers them, the buzz is much louder. And they fly in front of my face instead of next to me.

Computer electronics get more and more hive-like rather than human as we speed up processing. The earlier forms used clumsy direct paths but even so, with the 1-0 paradigm was already not quite human (er, I guess! heh). I brains are, I fear, mostly for processing either our dreams or our waking emotions. We have to train them to do other things like hunt without shooting lobbyists in the face, for example. But even with hunting, the more one does the actual killing in "automode" the more successful one is. This is why we target shoot. I can tell by the sound of the release of the string of a bow if the arrow will hit the target.

Anyway, back to the astonishing news today that paradoxical non-one/non-zero computing can occur under some conditions means very small electronics can be used if this state is stable enough, to do much more than present systems that rely on a cascade of 1s and 0s alternating rather than co-existing. Actually, I hope this sounds even slightly reasonable. Trying to make sense of all this is difficult and actually, I have more questions than answers, myself.

One of the things mentioned by the scientists is the old paradox of Zeno, the race between Achilles and the tortoise.

This paradox turns on much the same considerations as the last. Imagine Achilles chasing a tortoise, and suppose that Achilles is running at 1 m/s, that the tortoise is crawling at 0.1 m/s and that the tortoise starts out 0.9 m ahead of Achilles. On the face of it Achilles should catch the tortoise after 1s, at a distance of 1m from where he starts (and so 0.1m from where the Tortoise starts). We could break Achilles' motion up as we did Atalanta's, into halves, or we could do it as follows: before Achilles can catch the tortoise he must reach the point where the tortoise started. But in the time he takes to do this the tortoise crawls a little further forward. So next Achilles must reach this new point. But in the time it takes Achilles to achieve this the tortoise crawls forward a tiny bit further. And so on to infinity: every time that Achilles reaches the place where the tortoise was the tortoise has had enough time to get a little bit further, and so Achilles has another run to make, and so Achilles has in infinite number of finite catch-ups to do before he can catch the tortoise, and so, Zeno concludes, he never catches the tortoise.

The closer Achillies gets to the pesky turtle, the slower time flows until he crosses the event horizon and ends up with no time or space because both he and the pesky reptile are on a black hole.

Kind of like Iraq for us. You go in, can't get out again. And everything is frozen in time except when bombs go off and then one gets to live in all eternity.

Heh. See? I brought everything back to Bush and Cheney, the Black Hole Twins! Hooray.

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By Elaine Meinel Supkis

This illustration shows classic cosmic theory, the Big Bang happened and everything flew outwards, evenly. Everything is flowing away and will fly apart faster and faster until it all burns up and dissappears into nothingness or rips apart suddenly because it is flying away faster and faster thanks to mysterious "dark matter." This is just plain silly.

From the NYT:

The show is a $3 million production by NASA and the American Museum of Natural History, where Mr. Emmart is the director of astrovisualization at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Narrated by Robert Redford, the show provides a bold and colorful look at the universe — with colliding stars, planets and even galaxies — based on theories and data collected from 30 scientists around the world.

"There can't be anything wrong, factually or visually, with anything about this presentation," said Michael Shara, curator of astrophysics at the museum. "It has to be consistent with what is being written in the science journals."

This show includes the future Andromeda/Milky Way (that's us!) merger. Again and again, I wonder how astronomers can swallow the BS about the universe expanding faster and faster. This is pure lunacy. Funny, how the word for crazy uses the image of the moon.

While most of the presentation focuses on the past, the show includes a preview of what scientists predict will happen in two billion years: a collision between Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way, and its nearest neighbor, Andromeda, that will create one vast new galaxy.

"The two galaxies," Mr. Braun said, "are drifting toward each other right now."

According to my diagram, this is impossible. If everything is flying apart, it can't be crashing together. There is no way we can cross paths. Mapping the universe has shown clearly "strings" of matter. Instead of a uniform field, the pesky stellar stuff likes to lump itself along long lines leading to big globular clusters. The question is, are these globular clusters sliding into each other, too?

Any logical system should take a line of reasoning and run it to the logical conclusion and if data doesn't match then the line of reasoning is flawed.

Astronomy is in crisis mode right now. To maintain older theories, reality has to be tormented increasingly to the point of creating stuff out of whole cloth which is fun and stupid. If there is an easy explanation for something then most likely, that is the explanation!

So, if galaxies are falling INTO each other's gravity wells and all smaller galaxies are falling into bigger galactic gravity wells then this means the universe isn't shooting outwards at all, it is FALLING INWARDS. The curve of space-time gives us the illusion of falling outwards just like when one is in freefall going into a planet, one thinks one is weightless even though one is very definitely falling relentlessly. Space if full of such contrary-wise perceptions which is why Einstein's understanding of relativity was such a brilliant revelation.

I am no astronomer, I was born at an observatory and grew up in them, quite literally, my bedroom was in an observatory for a while, even. Not having to ever have to take an exam, I never had to cough up and drill into my head, standard theoretic stuff so I have nothing to loose to examine the facts coming in and the facts are, ALL GALAXIES ARE IN FREE FALL!

And what is attracting all of them, the ultimate planet, so to speak, the thing causing this?

Gravity. Simple gravity. The energy of the Big Bang has been expended and now consolidation is going on as all the Big Bang stellar debrie is being suctioned up by giant black holes. Look at our galaxy, looks like an Electrolux vacuum cleaner, the dirty debrie circling down into the center. Smaller galaxies being ripped apart as they slither down like string or ribbon being devoured by the vacuum cleaner.

I happen to like this diagram. :)

Space/Time III

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Astronomers wonder about all the contridictory data concerning the time/space continuum. Tons of data flow in and makes hash of assumptions. Einstein was right, he was wrong, he was right about being wrong, actually, we have to think about our journey in time as a spiral, not a straight line. Then some things might make sense, sort of.

From the New York Times:

As Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas said, Einstein's biggest blunder was believing the cosmological constant was a blunder.

Since the 1998 discovery, astronomers have been racing to chart the history of the expansion of the universe more precisely to pin down the properties of dark energy. Observations by Dr. Riess and his colleagues with the Hubble Space Telescope two years ago have determined that the universe hit the gas pedal about five billion years ago.

Dr. Schaefer used as his mileage markers 52 gamma ray bursts, which are 100 to 1,000 times as powerful as Type 1a supernovas, and can thus be seen much farther away, or back in time. The bursts, which can be seen only from space, have been studied by satellites like the High Energy Transient Explorer, or HETE.

The most distant burst, at 12.8 billion light-years, occurred when the universe was 6 percent of its present age, Dr. Schaefer said.

His measurements put the dark energy in a controversial category named phantom energy, which if it continued unabated would rip apart the cosmos in a few billion years.

Well, we will be "ripped apart" when our little galaxy is sucked into the Great Attractor! You see, pretend we are a little bug on a wine glass. When we look at a glass, we see straight through to the other side but if we transit the exterior of the glass, it is a long journey. We can't understand how it can be curved when, from our limited view front and back, it looks pretty flat but we can see perfectly well where we were in the past and where we want to go. Thinking about our TRAVEL in time vs where we can see things today, we traveled in a vast spiral. From point A to point B. Our spiral travel is inside a mega bubble of the Big Bang. So there are two images here, the expanding balloon with all elements spiralling towards greater elements which punch ever deeper gravity pools in the fabric of the balloon.

Mother Nature absolutely loves spirals.

The logarithmic or equiangular spiral was first defined symbollically by Descartes in 1638 by the equation

r=ka

which relates the polar coordinates of any point in the spiral and expresess an exponential growth pattern. In nature it is usually associated with the growth of dead tissues forming structures, like shells of many invertebrates, corals and several horns found in mammalian species, by an accretionary process.

Ever wonder about the structure of reality? It is most marvelous. Many systems follow many laws, seems Mother Nature is a megomaniacal mathematical tinkerer. This is what "intelligent design" really means! The forms of nature repeat themselves on many levels. Hurricanes and Nautilus shells and galaxies, big and small, follow the same mathematical formula.

And if our galaxy's path through time and space left accretions like a trail, why, it wouldn't surprize me at all to see it is the same pattern a mere sea creature makes, growing progressively larger.

Mother Nature knows that simplicity creates an infinite range of effects when different materials and scales of action are applied. And She delights in this which is why we get to riddle everything out, as we learn Her many tricks, we should remember that the same things stay the same no matter how big or small. Why would the Universe "blow apart" by shooting out to nowhere when we are in a spiral down into another, greater black hole? Doesn't sound like we are going in the opposite direction, does it????

Eh?

Well, no one will listen to me. Maybe I should go back to listening to one giant black hole's B flat 5 million octaves below Middle C!

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By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Years ago, I figured out my own scheme describing how the space/time continuum works. Since all these wonderful terrestrial and space observatories have been pouring in raw data, astronomy has been relentlessly pulled away from what I believe is a the false "universe is expanding faster and faster" storyline to a new model which is, the universe is sliding down steeper and steeper gravity pits created by increasingly gigantic black holes and that we are in a collapsing universe, not an expanding one, the fabric of the PAST is getting stretched more and more, the FUTURE is being compressed.

From Space.com:

A spinning black hole in the constellation Scorpius has created a stable dent in the fabric of spacetime, scientists say.

The dent is the sort of thing predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. It affects the movement of matter falling into the black hole.

The spacetime-dent is invisible, but scientists deduced its existence after detecting two X-ray frequencies from the black hole that were identical to emissions noted nine years ago. The finding will allow scientists to calculate the black hole's spin, a crucial measurement necessary for describing the object's behavior.

I have exchanged emails over all this stuff with my parents who are well known astronomers as well as many other things, they being the ultimate polymaths.

I don't do the numbers crunching of physics but my dad said, I was probably on the right path only he didn't want to think about this too much, a common problem with cosmic matters, namely, it is all about thinking about the End of Time.

It is curious to me how the infinitely expanding universe model keeps its grip on most astronomer's cosmos. My grandfather warned me about this, he knew Einstein and was pre-einsteinian, having gotten his degree before Einstein became famous. It seems, most humans like to cling to whatever they learn no matter what which is why astronomic changes are called "revolutions" after the great Copernicus book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestrium. The facts on the ground are being misinterpeted by observers who are reluctant to revise old ideas. Eventually, the accumulated information will force everyone to rethink, what is the space/time fabric and how shall we represent it, graphically as well as in numbers.

One can't do the numbers unless one can do the artwork for imagining things is the first step towards describing them.

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By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Yet another study of what is now known to be a very common event: galaxies colliding with each other. This latest paper by Prof. Merritt is tries to explain why smaller galaxies sometimes don't have a black hole core anymore. At the same time this work has been done, astronomers in Britain claim they have located a major galactic black hole split event at HE0450-2958. There is some dispute about this.

From Eurekalert.org:

Virtually all galaxies are believed to contain supermassive black holes at their centers. According to current theory, galaxies grow through mergers with other galaxies. When two galaxies merge, their central black holes form a binary system and revolve around each other, eventually coalescing into a single black hole. The coalescence is driven by the emission of gravitational radiation, as predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity.

Merritt and his colleagues determined how fast a black hole has to move to completely escape a galaxy's gravitational field. They found that larger and brighter galaxies have stronger gravitational fields and would require a bigger kick to eject a black hole than the smaller systems. Likewise, less forceful impacts could jar the black hole out of its home at the center of a galaxy, only to later rebound back into position.

The kicks also call into question theories that would grow supermassive black holes from hierarchical mergers of smaller black holes, starting in the early universe. "The reason is that galaxies were smaller long ago, and the kicks would easily have removed the black holes from them," Merritt says.

According to Merritt and his co-authors, it's more likely that supermassive black holes attained most of their mass through the accretion of gas and that mergers with other black holes only took place after the galaxies had reached roughly their current sizes.

Right on the heels of this paper being published came this news out of Europe. From World Science:

A collision between two galaxies may have led them to spit out a colossal black hole that’s still soaring through space, some astronomers have calculated.

If correct, the proposal would be the first evidence of a possibility astrophysicists have theorized for years: a black hole’s expulsion from a galaxy.

Indirectly, it could also shed light on how some black holes became as big as they are—a longstanding puzzle that’s also entangled with the question of how galaxies formed.

A team of researchers describe the results in a paper to appear in an upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a research journal.

They claim an enigmatic object known as HE0450-2958, estimated to weigh as much as 400 million suns or more, may be the expelled black hole.

I have noticed some people have mocked Europe for "weakening" and becoming a "backwater" for science. This comes mostly from Americans who like to preen themselves for our past accomplishments all of which have been in rising jeopardy thanks to the insane Bush/GOP program to dumb down America.

Prof. Merritt disputes the contention of the Europeans saying, the black hole is still inside the hot gas envelope of the host galaxy so it really hasn't "escaped". I contend, it can't escape. Indeed, no galaxy will ever escape any other, bigger, galaxy's gravitational pool because contrary to present dogma, the universe isn't expanding straight outwards, time/space isn't straight at all, it is increasingly warped as we move further away from the initial impetus of the Big Bang's outward force.

Here is the picture of one black hole spiralling away from its host.

When I was a child, Walt Disney used to produce "science" films and cartoons. One of them was about the space program and tried to explain gravity and how rockets don't fly straight away from the earth but have to spiral away. My parents were asked to view the film before it appeared in public to critique it. Since our family had seven children, we were asked to watch, too. I remember vividly the parts where they illustrated physics by using billiard balls and a cue stick. After the showing, we demanded our father get us a pool table and we played it so much, I used to amuse myself as an adult, knocking those ivories about in bars, astonishing men who thought women couldn't play well.

The main thing was, using the billiard table model gives a totally false mental picture of the cosmos. For it isn't flat. Carl Sagan gave a much better presentation explaining gravity on his famous TV series for PBS. He understood, the critical nature of time/space around any physical body is warped and the only way most items operate in this medium is to spiral in or out. Indeed, comets and rockets skim down into gravitational pools in order to pick up speed as they skim back out again. It seems as if they then fly off, forever, except they don't, for the most part. Most of the rocks that fall down the sun's gravitational pool shoot back into deep space only to return. This was first noted about Halley's comet, a recent spectacular visitor who comes back like clockwork, it being trapped in the inner la Grange orbits of the sun.

Rocks trapped on the sun's galatic plane seldom degrade in orbit. But those which fall down the pool from other angles do degrade and they are a tremendous danger to us since they can hit the planets that orbit the sun. One should suppose, the angle of movement determines whether or not a body "merges" (crashes).

Back to billiards and black holes: it seems pretty certain, the universal rule of thumb in the universe is, all black holes will fall into the gravitational pull of all bigger black holes and since they sometimes crowd in, more than one at a time, it is like 3 D billiards, the new incoming galaxy will act like the cue ball and striking two galaxies that are near to merging, can "kick" one of them outwards. Only this doesn't mean the escaping galaxy is dissappearing into the wild blue yonder.

Here is my schematic drawing of a non-flat billiard game.
If the cue ball hits very hard on only one of the two balls, one of them can be sent spinning away while the cue ball and the remaining ball stay "stationary" vis a vis each other, in other words, the cue ball displaces the second ball. But absolutely nothing in the universe is "stationary" except in relation to only one body at a time. The multi-level complex movements of various bodies makes the fabric of space a very complex entity. If we could see this visually, the ripples, waves and whirlpools would make an ocean in spring flux off the shores of New Foundland look placid.

It is amusing and scary to me, watching scientists riddle out this business of gravity because of course, Einstein first theorized that all things move relative to each other and this relativity warps light and fools the eye of the beholder. This caution has been overcome by using the magic of numbers to express the relative movements. But as always, one has to have a visual image to dump this data into and mine happens to be spiral/circle/round rather than open space that stretches to infinity.

Just like if we shoot a cannonball, it goes x number of meters but eventually falls back to earth. If we shoot a rocket, it goes x numbers of miles and then goes where? We haven't done any studies of this, yet. We have some probes that are eventually going to clear our solar system, they being exceedingly light and thus, able to escape the gravitational pool of the sun which isn't that great, cosmically speaking. Of course, Bush and the political tools running NASA have cut funding for tracking Voyager, for example, which is, to my mind, really stupid.

One thing is certain, in my mind, there is no way Voyager or anything we send out, will escape our galaxy any more than our galaxy can escape all the others going towards the Great Attractor. Which takes us back to the whole business of visuallizing the universe. I would posit that many astronomers are like "flat earth" people, unable to understand emotionally, that the earth isn't the center of the universe. Thinking about space as essentially flat is wrong.

And thinking there is some "dark attractor" that isn't the Great Attractor which is "tearing apart the universe" and all that ripping of the cosmos talk is desperation, trying to think of things as if there is no gravity at work here, on a mega/mega scale.

Space/Time II

My grandpa decorated his personal observatory in Pasedena with a series of hand drawn pictures coupled with photographs, all of them were of Mars. Very carefully, for years and years, at Lowell Observatory and Mt. Wilson, he would patiently sit in the cold thin air in the open dome and draw patiently the Canals of Mars.

Everyone believed in these canals. There they were! Plain as the nose on your face! Books were written, speculating about the water ways and who might have built them. Everyone wanted to believe in them and did.

But then, younger astronomers like my dad, shattered this illusion when they improved optics and were able to see Mars much more clearly. There wasn't even the slightest sign of any canals there.

My grandpa kept the pictures up for a reason: to teach us and anyone who wanted to learn the lesson, what happens when you want to see something badly. Humans will see it. This is one of the basic fallacies of science. That it won't be deluded.

Yet it can and is. Not to fault anyone, my grandpa was awesomely intelligent and had great eyes, it was just the desire to see something overwhelmed everyone's good sense about drawing conclusions from the visual data. Human nature is a stubborn thing. It never really changes. We live and learn and we see more and more, better and better as computers and optics and transreceivers improve and extend out ability to see, we still live in the realm of our wishes and dreams and desires and illusions. This is why mere calculations are not sufficient to penetrate the veils that conceal reality from our minds, we have to carefully choose our words and the images these words project.

"String" for example, makes us think of items like a necklace. Whereas, "folds in space" causes quite a different mental image. "Waves and swells over the surface of the space/time continuum" is again, quite different. All describe the same data.

The mind processes information and the changing stations in the mind are linguistic/cultural constructs. People who learn things in school as adults think differently from children who learn the same information using different code words or overhearing conversations of adults arguing about cosmological data. When I talk to my siblings, for example, we lapse into code language about time and space that could appear rather spooky to outsiders. To us, it is simple, understandable. It irritates us to reset our minds to talk with outsiders about these matters. This is why I struggle to explain what seems to me to be painfully obvious.

There is no mysterious dark matter tearing apart the universe. Unless you want to call "the side effects of gravitational pools" "dark matter". But then, everyone would have to face up to the horrible fact that our tiny little galaxy is doomed to be sucked down the maw of the Great Attractor who isn't pretty at all but scary as all heck! Rats! Who wants that!

So to preserve the illusion that the univese will expand forever, "dark matter" has been called to save the day. My grandpa was trained to be an astronomer during the 19th Century. He started his first job at Yerkes observatory when it was brand new. He rode mules up mountains and was one of the first to say, Meteor Crater was from a meteor. He did this on horseback. Long ago.

He remembered pre-Einsteinian physics.

To explain how light traveled, while discounting the effects of gravitational pools and relative time/space curves, to explain light, scientists came up with the "aether" concept. The universe was surrounded by this invisible gas that caused all the odd things astronomers observed as they analyzed light.

It was all bunk. When Einstein proved this, it was resisted. But some, like my grandpa, suddenly understood its import and began to excitedly review past data and rearrange the furniture in the mind, dumping all the learned material, putting it in the junk bin. And it took thirty long years for him to do this, along with everyone, and he was never happy about it, or comfortable.

My parents took it for granted.

But when the Hubble started to overturn the apple cart, doubts arose. Just last year, my father said to me, "You may be right, you make sense, I can see in my mind your picture but the whole thing makes me sick". I said, "Why?" Truly puzzled. What is wrong with the idea that all things will loop back upon themselves because space/time is folding thanks to the gravitational weight of the greatest globular galaxies? This is no worse than the other possibilities!

Indeed, when I chat with astronomers from India or China, they are not nearly so disturbed, indeed, this is the best outcome of all! Eternal rebirth! Over and over again!

So I decided, the roots, as always, lie in the religious scrim we use to set cosmological matters in, namely, the belief system set up by ancient astronomers holds steady in our minds for it is embedded in the very words we use, the Indo-european root words that expressed the moon and stars and sun and earth all in this vast, linguistic net that vibrates with life because we use it every day and can't escape it.

Which is why, thinking "out of the box" is so dangerous.
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The data concerning galactic collisions builds ever higher:

(Astronomers) now believe a thin sprinkling of stars once thought to be a halo is in fact part of Andromeda's main disk.

That makes the spiral galaxy, so close to Earth that it appeared as a fuzzy blob to the ancients, more than 220,000 light-years across -- triple the previous estimate of 70,000 to 80,000 light-years.

It appears that the outer fringes of the disk were made when smaller galaxies slammed together, they told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Minneapolis.

When the first images of colliding galaxies showing really big collisions that were obviously two monster star systems slamming into each other quite dramatically, astronomers, eager to preserve the old fiction of the ever expanding universe decided that these collisions were very old and very far away and thus due to the "youth" of the Big Bang.

But the data keeps pouring in.

"This giant disk discovery will be very hard to reconcile with computer simulations of forming galaxies. You just don't get giant rotating disks from the accretion of small galaxy fragments," Ibata said in a statement.

Ibata, Scott Chapman of the California Institute of Technology and colleagues in Britain and Australia worked together using observations from the Keck II telescope in Hawaii.

The computer simulations all assume an expanding universe. So the actual data no longer (actually never) suits the underlying precepts the computer uses.

It is now painfully obvious. Astronomers all agree we are sliding into the giant vortex of Andromeda. We are a smaller entity and thus doomed to gravitate into our nearest neighbor's system. And Andromeda is doomed to fall into the Great Attractor, a seemingly uninteresting looking item that has tremendous gravitational powers.

So, how does all of this fit into the new model of the universe, the one where it is expanding at a faster and faster rate, flying apart, seemingly? Huh? Something is amiss. Hugely. And the mind can't accomodate this information and at the same time, hold to the ever expanding universe model.

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The data concerning galactic collisions builds ever higher:

(Astronomers) now believe a thin sprinkling of stars once thought to be a halo is in fact part of Andromeda's main disk.

That makes the spiral galaxy, so close to Earth that it appeared as a fuzzy blob to the ancients, more than 220,000 light-years across -- triple the previous estimate of 70,000 to 80,000 light-years.

It appears that the outer fringes of the disk were made when smaller galaxies slammed together, they told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Minneapolis.

When the first images of colliding galaxies showing really big collisions that were obviously two monster star systems slamming into each other quite dramatically, astronomers, eager to preserve the old fiction of the ever expanding universe decided that these collisions were very old and very far away and thus due to the "youth" of the Big Bang.

But the data keeps pouring in.

"This giant disk discovery will be very hard to reconcile with computer simulations of forming galaxies. You just don't get giant rotating disks from the accretion of small galaxy fragments," Ibata said in a statement.

Ibata, Scott Chapman of the California Institute of Technology and colleagues in Britain and Australia worked together using observations from the Keck II telescope in Hawaii.

The computer simulations all assume an expanding universe. So the actual data no longer (actually never) suits the underlying precepts the computer uses.

It is now painfully obvious. Astronomers all agree we are sliding into the giant vortex of Andromeda. We are a smaller entity and thus doomed to gravitate into our nearest neighbor's system. And Andromeda is doomed to fall into the Great Attractor, a seemingly uninteresting looking item that has tremendous gravitational powers.

So, how does all of this fit into the new model of the universe, the one where it is expanding at a faster and faster rate, flying apart, seemingly? Huh? Something is amiss. Hugely. And the mind can't accomodate this information and at the same time, hold to the ever expanding universe model.

Space/Time Is All Relative

My grandaddy used to love to tell me funny stories. "You see the sunlight?" he would say. I would nod in agreement. "Well, this isn't happening now, this is old sunlight, it is at least eight minutes old. For all we know, the sun could be gone and we won't know this for eight minutes!"

Ah, how reassuring that is for a child to hear! OK! The sun is shining, seemingly! His point was, the sun is a star and we are always doomed to see what has already happened, not what is presently happening. He would point to distant stars. "We have no idea what they look like today," he would tell me.

Aside from having a rather psychotic childhood, this forced me to never take any information for granted. All data was corrupted by time. The greater the distance, the greater the corruption of the incoming information. He explained red shift to me, too. It was still rather a new concept for him, it was first explained back when he was in middle age, after all. Thanks to the new fangled observatories at Mt. Wilson, his home, and Mt. Palomar, both activated before the Great Depression, the values of redshift were observed and analysed. So for him, it was always an amazing thing. When my pioneer astronomer grandaddy was dying of extreme old age, black holes were "discovered".

I remember well, my astronomer parents struggling to understand this new fangled idea. It helps to get a little drunk, first, but they were teetotalers, thanks to my great grandmother's absolute nixing of any drinking (a long story behind that).

I grew up, listening to this debate rage in the sixties onwards. I am not an astronomer. I have no physics degrees. I just hobnob with those who have the magic keys to the Universe.

Well....along came the Hubble Space Telescope. I wrote, for Congress, "With this telescope, we will be able to see the Hand of God at the Moment of Creation". And so it was. As we look at the incoming data that this great telescope and the other great telescopes in space are assembling, each using a different wave length, suddenly, the harsh facts of our universe come increasingly into focus.

First, the universe is very complex. There are many kinds of galaxies and other entities in this Universe. It is very dense in places and it isn't even in quality or surface. Indeed, the physical aspects of it are very warped. Space/time isn't linear nor straight as the crow flies nor easily navigated by mere calculations from humans and computers. It is incredibly complex.

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Unlike most children, I grew up in a universe that was not only fluid but very tenuous. My grandfather instilled into my mind at a very early age, the idea that what you see now isn't what is now, it is only the past and the past is only a clue as to what is happening now. The sun, even as it shone upon my curious face, was something in the past, the sun was forever eight or more minutes ahead of me.

The confusions of Einsteinian space was normalacy for me. Aside from the fact that grandpa hung out with Einstein, both my parents allowed me to hang out in the observatories where they worked as well as free access to their offices. Like a cloud of chicks surrounding a clucking hen, my mother kept us within yelling distance of herself as she worked as an astronomer. I noticed, over the years, virtually no other astronomers did this.

When the Big Bang theory was born, I freaked out. "How can this happen?" I asked, over and over. "It was a Singularity", said my dad. "A miracle". This made him believe in "God". But it did the opposite for me. Traveling in the mind back to the beginning of it all, one has to understand the impossible.

So I built up a mental structure to explain this.

There are many laws of nature. There is gravity, there is conservation of energy, there is quantum mechanics and so on. Then there is random chance.

All my life, people talk about random chance. The favorite example used nearly universally is "'X' chances of being hit by lightning twice' or 'once'". I have been hit by lightning three times, directly, all indoors and all times, I took all possible measures to avoid being hit. What are the random chances of that? Not even in the same state, much less, building, too.

The number is so off the scale, perhaps, no human has ever won this record. Some have been hit several times, in the same place which is where lightning often hits. But I have been hit in odd places, never the same one. So I am a Singularity.

Thinking about Singularities amuses me. Imagine space and time when there was nothing there. Time was eternal since nothing degraded, there were no laws of nature because there was nothing to act out the laws, ergo, the laws were null and void. In this state of nonbeing, something had to be working, it had to have no physical features because this required something existing. What exists in nothingness?

Random chance.

What is random chance under these circumstances? Since there is nothing, it happens without anything acting out because of randomosity. This means, the only thing that is possible at all times is nothing. Head hurt yet? Well, when all possible chances are exhausted, there are other chances, more improbable like five Republicans winning in an election, all of them getting 18181 as the vote total? It "happened" here in America but I doubt it was due to random chance. Nonetheless, random chance silently and invisibly deals with such improbabilities and they are done, and it continues with contemplation of all possibilities. Eventually, there being no time, glitches in randomness occur as the improbable folds back into itself into such contortions that all possible improbabilities are now on top of each other and crushed together and then the only thing left is the impossible: a true Singularity.

This moment is amazingly explosive. All the laws of Nature are born simultaneously. Time begins.

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I was told, the universe is a vast balloon and all the matter rides on the outside membrane of this balloon. When we use the Hubble Space Telescope to look back in time, we see galaxies from all the way back to nearly the very beginning when light began to shine because we can only look backwards in time. As the balloon expands, the various galaxies race away from each other and soon enough, all will spin off into the eternal darkness, never to see each other again, to dwindle into cold pieces of stone...what a delightful idea...not.

I couldn't accept this fatalistic vision. It clashed with too many things, especially the idea that things are born, mature, die and then are reborn in a new form or shape. Nature has a tendency to create as well as destroy.

So I held my tongue for years until the Hubble Space Telescope began to reveal to us the true nature of the Universe. The joy with which I greeted each revelation is inexpressible. I still tear up when I look at some of the mind numbingly beautiful visions.

And I started counting.

How many galaxies are crashing into each other. Great grinding wheels, sliding into each other. "Maybe there is only a few", astronomers said when I was very little. As the clustering of galaxies became more and more obvious, string theory was created to explain this strange thing. Maybe they like string out, only to move away from each other, forever?

Then, in recent years, astronomers began to realize, galaxies slide into each other...a lot. And that we are sliding into Andromeda. And Andromeda and we are sliding along with the Local Group of galaxies into the Great Attractor.

Interacting Galaxies

Fossil Galaxies 'Eat Their Neigbors'

This BBC story is particularily funny because it is full of ideas that are not only half baked, but downright insane. Why would anyone call this giant conglamoration of a star system a "fossil" is beyond belief! It isn't dead yet. Nor dying. Nor going away, for that matter. It is FEEDING. Anything coming near their gravitational pools which should be called gravitational seas, slides helplessly down the maw of these beasts.

It would be like watching a living Tyrannasaurus Rex eat and saying, "It is a fossil" just because we see the results of its dinner 2 million years in the past. As granddaddy would say, "How do you know what it is doing today? There is no way of telling".

Then along comes this attempt at explaining things:

Black Holes 'Do Not Exist'
By Philip Ball © ESA/NASA
4-7-5
 
Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist.

Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion.
 
George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. "It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist," he claims.
 
Black holes are one of the most celebrated predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the warping of space-time caused by massive objects. The theory suggests that a sufficiently massive star, when it dies, will collapse under its own gravity to a single point.
 
But Einstein didn't believe in black holes, Chapline argues. "Unfortunately", he adds, "he couldn't articulate why." At the root of the problem is the other revolutionary theory of twentieth-century physics, which Einstein also helped to formulate: quantum mechanics.

Ah, someone is treading nearby, but then misses:

He also thinks that the Universe could be filled with 'primordial' dark-energy stars. These are formed not by stellar collapse but by fluctuations of space-time itself, like blobs of liquid condensing spontaneously out of a cooling gas. These, he suggests, could be stuff that has the same gravitational effect as normal matter, but cannot be seen: the elusive substance known as dark matter.
 
References
 
Chapline G. Arxiv, http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503200 (2005).
 
Bill Hamilton AstroScience Research Network http://www.astrosciences.info/ "I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible." Fred Hoyle
 
http://www.nature.com/physics/=

OK. The "in" thing today is "dark matter". This is the aether of the 21st Century. The mysterious force that "explains" everything. Only....it is a duex ex machina concocted to keep us from thinking about the Tyrannasaurus Rex galaxies happily munching on smaller galaxies.

Cute but no Kuiper doll.

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Why would Nature and random chance want to rip apart the Universe? It seems to me to be an awful waste. Usually, big things eat smaller things. You might call this a Law of Nature, red in tooth and claw. Seems to be the order of the day, here on earth. Little things eat big things, too. Germs and worms and vultures dine on the dead. Matter breaks down and is remade over and over again.

Why would Nature do otherwise?

Let's look at the balloon caused by the Singularity. The force of the explosion caused all the possible matter in the Universe to flow outwards since it was released...oh, from the prison of nothingness where it was boxed in so utterly. Ahem.

The force of the explosion carries all before it, the balloon moves into the vacuum of nothingness pushing all matter outwards. But smaller singularities form nearly immediately because of the density of matter, it tends to fall INTO EACH OTHER rather than repulsed away from each other. The energy to repulse starts when the first stars began to shine, the departing photon units have some force behind them.

I know this is bad physics, but bear with me for you are traveling through the thought patterns of a child, this is how I reasoned out things as a child.

It isn't one or two or twenty or fifty galaxies falling into each other, EVERY galaxy is falling into each other all the time. Each one has a gravitational pool. Each pool is as deep as each galaxy's mass can create on the surface of the space/time continuum. The great galaxies that are surrounded by hundreds or thousands of captive galaxies have deeeep indentations in the space/time balloon's surface. So deep, light from galaxies behind these monsters is multiplied and warped hugely, unimaginably hugely.

So, if all galaxies are falling INTO each other, how can the Universe be expanding rapidly and forever? What about red shift?
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Pretend you have this immensely huge balloon. And each galaxy is a finger pressing into the surface of this balloon. As you travel along the outside skin of this balloon, it looks, as you POKE EVER DEEPER, that the time to pass out of the indentation you are in, travel around the balloon and then travel down into the indentation on the other side of the balloon, it is a great distance. Huge. Amazing. As you slide down the side of the opposite indentation, you speed up and it looks like your home indentation is truly traveling away from you at an increasingly accelerating speed.

Now, pretend you are God sitting in the middle of this balloon.

You can see the fingers indenting the balloon all at once, they are all coming closer together, the greater the weight, the closer to the center of the balloon they go.

All the smaller fingers are slipping along the surface of the balloon towards the two main fingers pressing in the hardest. Eventually after sitting there for 20 billion+ years, the fingers on either side of the balloon are the only ones left and they touch in the center.

And merge.

This will be called, "The Big Bang" by some future organism that figures out something is afoot.

Saturn's Rings Are Made From Ice Pulled From Moon, Encaladus

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The source of Saturn's rings seems to be one of the moons which is mostly H2O. The side of the moon facing Saturn has water volcanoes that shoot out a fine mist which is why the rings are so etheral.

ENS Newswire:

One of Saturn's moons is sending geysers of water into space that fall back to the moon as snow, a joint U.S.-European exploratory space mission reports. The plumes of icy water also replenish the water particles that make up Saturn's largest ring - the E-ring, the scientists have discovered.

Data from the spacecraft Cassini obtained during a close flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus show that large amounts of water are spewing into space from the tiny moon's surface. This water originates near "south polar hot spots on the moon, possible locations for the development of primitive life in the solar system," the scientists said.

"We realize that this is a radical conclusion - that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold," said Dr. Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms."

Enceladus is a small moon, just 505 kilometers (314 miles) across, but it is highly reflective due to the fresh layer of snow and ice on its surface, the scientists said. The icy geysers at the south pole, erupting from a series of cracks, appear to be pumping a continuous flow of water particles into the area above the moon. Much of the material falls back to the surface as snow.

Along side this revelation comes a much more interesting idea, one that utterly charms me:

UPI:

An international team of scientists has found that the source of Saturn`s outer ring is water vapor from the planet`s moon Enceladus.

In an article in the journal Science, the researchers say that a plume of water vapor from Enceladus`s south pole has also given the moon a water-based atmosphere. They believe that internal processes within the moon are generating heat to produce the vapor.

The outer ring, known as the E-ring, stretches between the orbits of the moons Mimas and Titan. It is composed of microscopic particles.

The atmosphere was found during three fly-bys by the Cassini unmanned spacecraft in 2005. After researchers examined data from the first two fly-bys, they convinced the Cassini Project to bring the probe within 105 miles of Enceladus on the third.

'It was extremely exciting to have all the other instruments confirm our initial discovery, particularly when it was found that the atmosphere was changing from flyby to flyby and was closely linked with the subsequent plume observations at the South Pole,' said Michele Dougherty, a professor at Imperial College in London.

One of the most beautiful sights in the solar system. As one can observe here on earth, fine ice crystals light up so brilliantly, when it is below zero at night and only stars are shining, the sparkling ice crystals light up dark fields so much one can walk around safely in the faintly lit snow.

I always wondered how the rings, so thin and fragile, keep going and it probably is because of the feed coming from this moon. All the moons near the giant planets seem to be very active due to the intense interaction with the planets that hold them captive. One wonders if the moon did this with the earth when it orbited much closer. Did the moon, too, have water? Did this water fall to the earth over a billion years and during that time, did the earth, too, have a lovely ring around it? Questions like these are quite an interesting concept because we can only guess what went on so long ago. The fact that our planet has successfully captured a great deal of water and manages to keep it is most amazing when considering the probabilities of this happening. All the accidental happanstances of our good forture is why we were able to evolve into water consuming, water retaining life forms!

Of course, "intelligent design" people get this all backwards. Since our planet, out of the probability of billions if not megatrillions of chances, is habitable for water using lifeforms isn't due to someone sitting down and figuring out how to manage this but by the simple fact that this happened and life forms of our sort happened. If there are other planets in this same, happy situation elsewhere in creation, is very likely. In the same galaxy and same vicinity, that is, arm of the same galaxy, this is less and less likely. Since there are an amazing number of galaxies, time and space, the probabilities are good that similar planets spawned similar life forms over the last 16 billion years.

How much water was available during the formation of our solar system? We know that H20 is prevelent throughout the universe in varying amounts, unevenly distributed. It is much rarer in liquid form. Just this week, a planet has been discovered orbiting a red dwarf and it was probably mostly water until the star collapsed into a dwarf long ago. One wonders if life had evolved there before the eternal ice age set in? And why didn't the water disappear when the sun died? So many riddles!

The more we observe the universe, the more questions. I know many scientists are eager to proclaim victory in decifering the information we gather but this seems pretty hasty to me, the verities of astronomy seem less and less, not more and more stable over time. We see a tiny bit and then think everything is that same thing simply by assuming all things are the same when they aren't.

For example, the deep space probing done this last year was amazing and showed clearly that the universe is much more diverse and odd than our assumptions.

I remember when the first space probes went out. Actually, when we landed on the moon, the sight of our own home planet struck the astronauts with awe. Truly, a gem. As we get a closer look at our own backyard, we realize we know virtually nothing and as we learn more, none of it fits what we assumed years ago based on the earlier observations done at observatories.

My grandfather spent years detailing "canals" on Mars, for example. Now we have a good idea of what Mars looks like and it looks like the Sahara except it has no obvious life forms.

Speaking of water and the Sahara, Libya is mining fossil water that filled underground reservoirs 40,000 years ago during the great melt-off that coincided with the sun spitting out some really violent activity back then. BBC News:

It is hard to fault the Libyans on their commitment. The country has spent almost $30bn (£17bn) on the Great Man-made River Project. That money has bought 5,000km of pipeline that can transport 6.5 million cubic metres of water a day from over a thousand desert wells.

As a result, Libya is now a world leader in hydrological engineering, and it wants to export its expertise to other African and Middle-Eastern countries facing the same problems with their water.

Our exploitation of water is reaching back in time as well as capturing more and more water that is being generated by the present meltdown of the glaciers and condensation from the oceans. Water is a finite resource but luckily, is one that can be recycled. But volume is part of the equation. We are recklessly using water stored from previous sun/geology events and like fossil fuels, this can't be done for very long. In America, we are rapidly drawing down water from the same ice age melt down event.

And did Venus have water, too? BBC News:

On most planets and moons, impact craters tend to be clustered on very old parts of the surface, due to the heavy bombardment that is believed to have taken place in the early Solar System.

But craters on Venus are distributed randomly over the whole planet. This has led some scientists to the conclusion that most of the surface is of similar age.

One way to arrive at this result is by rapid resurfacing - the model long accepted by planetary scientists.

Timothy Bond and Mike Warner of Imperial College London have now thrown that theory into doubt.

Using computer modelling, they came up with a suite of possible scenarios that were compatible with the planet's cratering record and surface features.

They concluded that there was no need to invoke massive outpourings of lava over a short period. Instead, the planet's present-day surface could be compatible with a slow decline of volcanic activity, they argue.

Why is the earth so tectonically active? Mars is completely dead now. It did have activity long ago. The surface of Mars has a number of obvious impact craters just like Venus. But ours has few visible ones due to the activity of plates crashing and tearing into each other and lots of volcanic/subduction activity. One should assume this was much more active in the past. It is actually rather amazing that life forms were able to exist during the early years. Perhaps this greater degree of activity on the part of the planet enabled evolution to fast forward. We do know that uncertainty in the climate leads to great changes in life forms. On all levels, our planet looks more and more awesome and surprizing the more we look at other planets which seem to have a much shorter geological "life span."

This is why I am still outraged that NASA bent to Bush and his minions' political will and killed the Earth Observatory. The major planet to study is this one. It is the most interesting, important and vital planet in this system if not the entire galaxy! Talk about insane.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Fumble Finger NASA Accidents Foul Up Launches

Elaine Meinel Supkis

A sign of disgruntled employees is how people become clumsy. So it is no surprise to see launches cancelled due to butterfingers all over the place. The butter side of the launch always falls face down, you know.

CNN:

Kennedy Space Center employees returned to work Friday with orders to be more careful a day after a stand down was ordered following a spate of recent accidents.

James Kennedy, the space center's director, ordered work stopped for two hours Thursday while he addressed nearly 15,000 employees on safety issues over closed-circuit television.

He warned that a major accident could derail NASA's plans to complete the international space station and begin exploring the moon and then Mars.

Um, this certainly fills one with a sense of security! It is funny how nearly everything is turning into Potemkin Props. Our military is a paper Potemkin pumpkin that never turns into a coach anymore but stays a pumpkin even before midnight strikes!

The lastest great victory in battle turns out to have been the frying of a couple of sheep, the bombing of two tents and the arrest of a dozen teenagers.

Meanwhile, battles rage in Paris. Seems nothing works anymore, eh? Back to NASA, the top slots are filled with men (white men, I must add) who think capitalism solves all crimes and the best way to run things is to oppress workers, fire top nerds in their staff, kill off critics and loot the bank account. And we are going to Mars?

Seems the Rover broke down. Got a flat on the Intergalactic State and no troopers have shown up to call for road assistance.

Meanwhile, scientists beg NASA to launch the many observatories and probes that have been sidelined so we can go to the Moon and then Mars after we stop dropping tool boxes on the hood or punching holes in the tire.

The most alarming accident was setting the roof of the building holding the huge, filled with high explosives, tanks for the Space Shuttle. Now that is something that could have shot all the way to the Moon, Alice!

Well, back to attacking Iran. Something's got to work.

Culture of Life Main Page

Scientists Predict Sun Will Be More Active Next Cycle

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

We know not that much about our local star, the Sun. We have many assumptions which often are little more than wishful thinking. Ditto for our galaxy. Anyway, there is great dispute about what is going on with our local star and here is a recent report claiming the sun will spit even more x-rays at us this coming Solar Cycle which is bad news on several fronts.

From Associated Press:

A new computer model suggests that the next solar cycle will be more active than the previous one, potentially spawning magnetic storms that will be more severe and disruptive to communication systems.

The next sunspot cycle will be between 30 percent to 50 percent more intense than the last one, scientists said Monday.

Global warming has several elements three of which are key: relative distance from the sun, composition of the atmosphere and how much energy the sun is producing.

For example, if the sun shuts down sunspot activity, it gets mighty cold here. The more active the sun, the hotter it gets. Add a lot of fresh CO2 to the atmosphere and you get really serious global warming. The summer of tremendous solar activity we had several years ago knocked out electricity across the planet. It also disrupted communications and it withered the trees, I know my oaks didn't like it one bit.

The causes of the great ice ages are still very sketchy. The more we learn the less we can pin down the exact causes. Since this planet and the sun are both very dynamic systems, this means there are so many variables, it is hard to know what the trigger is, exactly. All we know is, there is a definite rhythm and this pulse is probably triggered by the interaction of the sun and the seas.

The new prediction is at odds with previous forecasts, which suggested that the intensity of the next solar cycle would be measurably smaller.

I don't know about anyone else but my hair was standing on end, the last cycle. Especially the x-ray episodes.

Exploding stars spit out x-rays. Stars turning into black holes spit out x-rays. X-ray events are quite noticable and not "normal" at least, if the object is a "regular" star still. According to my father, examination of recent Greenland core samples suggest the sun spat out some really nasty x-rays back 44,000 years ago, a significant time zone. If you google that number, you get some interesting biological hits. One thing, Homosapiens came pouring out of Africa. One wonders if the extended session dried out that continent to the point, humans had to forage much further and eat many more relatives who had been chased out earlier? We still know so little.

Maybe this session of superheating started the deep melting of the glacial icepacks? This would explain all the icedam lakes that ruptured so violently over the next 10,000 years.

If the sun does become seriously active, this means global warming will shoot up much faster. This will have a host of geological effects that puny dams and buildings won't stand a chance against. Like the sea suddenly rising a dozen feet or so?

We just don't know. Well, it will be very interesting, won't it?