Showing all posts tagged: science
Everything good and bad, but mostly very bad, about smoking
10 May 2024
A Screen cap of Kurzgesagt’s Smoking is Awesome YouTube video.
This month Kurzgesagt takes on smoking. If you’re a non-smoker, this may help you understand why people like to have a puff:
Smoking helps you focus at work and is an excuse to take regular breaks, which is good for you mentally. It’s a tool against boredom, it suppresses your appetite, it makes bad moments feel less bad and good moments better. It’s social, fun together and a good way to make friends as smokers always group up. Your lips are one of the most sensitive parts of your body and putting something between them is deeply satisfying.
But smoking is a double-edged sword; the longer you partake, the greater your risk of suffering from heart disease, cancers, and all sorts of other maladies.
This should be a classroom educational resource.
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education, health, science, video
Extraterrestrials may arrive in 500 years, but not in flying saucers
30 April 2024
In the late 1960’s, former United States President Jimmy Carter, reported seeing an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO). Today unexplained objects, or phenomena, seen in the skies, are referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP). Carter, however, was not expecting to participate in any historic close encounter of the third kind:
While puzzled by the object and its origins, Carter himself later said that, while he had considered the object to be a UFO — on the grounds it was unexplained — his knowledge of physics had meant he had not believed himself to be witnessing an alien spacecraft.
Some people may be unhappy that Carter allowed physics to get in the way of a good story. Because wouldn’t it be great if we could whiz about the galaxy in a vessel the size of the average suburban house, which every other intelligence in the galactic neighbourhood seems capable of, except us.
House-size flying saucers defy the laws of physics, because, you know, their builders seemingly are able to defy the laws of physics. It would however be awesome to zap back and forth to say the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, in a house-size vessel that could travel (presumably/somehow) faster than the speed of light. At least I’m not breaking the laws of dreaming there.
But if close-to-light-speed interstellar travel, together with the possibly of extraterrestrials visiting Earth (from the far side of the Milky Way, no less) intrigues you, read this Twitter/X post, by American physicist Casey Handmer. Visitors from civilisations, from maybe fifty thousand light years across the galaxy, may be mere centuries away from reaching our solar system:
Let’s say that any civilization that can figure out interstellar travel can develop from slow to 99% of the speed of light in 500 years, and they’re coming from the other side of the galaxy — 50,000 years ago. By the time the light of their first (presumably highly energetic, fireworksy) relativistic travel reaches us, they’re already 99% of the way here – just 500 years to roll out the welcome mat.
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The maybe immortal photon, the key to everlasting life?
25 April 2024
Light may have an infinite lifetime. Who’d have thought? Even after the eventual, possible, heat death of the universe, photons may live on as beacons of light in an impossibly dark cosmos… maybe:
One such candidate for a truly stable entity is the photon: the quantum of light. All of the electromagnetic radiation that exists in the Universe is made up of photons, and photons, as far as we can tell, have an infinite lifetime. Does that mean that light will truly live forever?
Sounds like life everlasting to me. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? If we could, somehow, infuse our consciousness, our living essence, into photons, could we — to lift a line from the Space Odyssey novels written by Arthur C. Clarke — preserve our “thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light?”
If so, we could then dispense with the botox regimens, followed by cryonics. This is an idea totally worth looking into.
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Extra-terrestrials may not want Earth as part of their galactic empire
19 April 2024
A conquering interstellar civilisation could bring the entire galaxy under its yoke in about a million years, assuming said civilisation could traverse the Milky Way at about ten percent the speed of light. I expect it’d be a multi-generational undertaking.
It’d also be up to those who conceived of the original vision to conquer the galaxy, to find a way to keep their descendants motivated. A million years is a long time.
This might be one reason why we’ve not encountered any extra-terrestrial lifeforms so far. No one has the energy to invade the whole galaxy, so they’ve stayed in their corner, undetected. But there is another possibility. The all-powerful invaders are being picky.
They’re only acquiring sections of the Milky Way, and the planets in those regions, that are of some sort of value to them. Perhaps Earth is not in that category.
This is the upshot of the latest Kurzgesagt video presentation. An interesting theory. We are not alone, but we are not wanted.
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Is the Sun conscious? Can a great ball of fire think for itself?
5 April 2024
Maybe I’ve been watching too much of Universe, the Brian Cox made documentary about, well, the universe, and am way too willing to take in all manner of ideas, no matter how outlandish they may seem. So when this article (PDF), exploring the possibility the Sun is a conscious entity (of some sort), written in 2020 by Rupert Sheldrake, appeared on my news feed recently, my curiosity was piqued.
Meanwhile, field theories of consciousness propose that some electromagnetic fields actually are conscious, and that these fields are by their very nature integrative. When applied to the sun, such field theories suggest a possible physical basis for the solar mind, both within the body of the sun itself and also throughout the solar system. If the sun is conscious, it may be concerned with the regulation of its own body and the entire solar system through its electromagnetic activity, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It may also communicate with other star systems within the galaxy.
If the Sun could talk, what might it say to us? Maybe, “do something about climate change before it’s too late.” Or, “always wear sunscreen when in my presence.”
It’s a fun idea, solar consciousness, but I’m not sure we’d ever hear Brian Cox going along with the notion. I’ll defer to Star Trekin’! in the meantime: it’s consciousness; but not as we know it…
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astronomy, humour, philosophy, science
Prolonged volcanic activity killed the dinosaurs not an asteroid
29 March 2024
Well, this is interesting. All these years I’ve thought the demise of the dinosaurs was occasioned by the impact of an asteroid that struck Earth sixty-six million years ago. That may be still the case, but some scientists believe relentless volcanic activity, spanning more than a million years before and after the strike, may have been the real culprit.
At first, the Deccan Traps, an enormous shield volcano located in what is present day India, began releasing small quantities of carbon dioxide and sulphur into Earth’s atmosphere. As time went on these emissions increased, until, about three hundred thousand years before the asteroid strike, furious volcanic eruptions commenced. After several hundred thousand years of the atmosphere being filled with toxic gases, Earth must have been all but uninhabitable anyway.
In short, the asteroid is blamed for the mass extinctions that marked the end of the Cretaceous era, simply because it arrived at the time it did. All of this is the subject matter of the latest Kurzgesagt video, and even if that’s not happened, there’s much to marvel over. One being the reign of the dinosaurs lasted one hundred and fifty million years.
Humanity, or at least Homo sapiens, have been present, perhaps a mere three hundred thousand years so far. And then there’s Earth itself. Towards the end of the Cretaceous era, the planet was far warmer, and humid, than presently. Forests flourished in polar regions, and despite the long polar nights, life went on in what have seemed like a short sleeve like environment. Fascinating.
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An app that points to centre of the Milky Way galaxy
26 March 2024
Image courtesy of Pexels.
Tangentially related to my previous post… product designer and technologist Matt Webb has created an app, named Galactic Compass (link to Apple app store), that points to the centre of the galaxy.
When on the (far less light polluted) NSW Central Coast, I can kind of look down from the tail of the constellation Scorpius (the scorpion), and be observing the right patch of the night sky.
When back amongst the super bright lights of Sydney though, that can be a little trickier. Like, find a star, any star, let alone the Scorpius constellation.
Read also Galactic Compass’ origin/development story, the app was built with help from ChatGPT.
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artificial intelligence, astronomy, science, technology
A patch for computer software one light-day away on Voyager 1
25 March 2024
One of the computers on NASA’s deep space probe Voyager 1 is experiencing some sort of malfunction, with recent signals from the probe containing no usable data. Mission engineers are apparently confident the problem can be resolved, even though Voyager 1 is almost a light-day distant, meaning it’ll take time to apply a fix:
Because Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for the probe’s response to reach antennas on the ground. So the team received the results of the command on March 3. On March 7, engineers began working to decode the data, and on March 10, they determined that it contains a memory readout.
Although Voyager 1, and deep space counterpart Voyager 2, have left the solar system and are in interstellar space, it is estimated it will take Voyager 1 another three hundred years to reach the Oort cloud. The vastly scattered debris, rocky remnants of the formation of the solar system, that constitutes the Oort cloud, may extend more than two light years from the Sun. That’s about half way to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.
So to be truly beyond the solar system, I imagine the Voyager probes will need to clear the Oort cloud first. We might be waiting sometime for that to happen. It’s incredible the way mission controllers can keep tabs on deep space missions though, and trouble shoot, and perhaps remedy problems, despite their distance from the Sun.
About twenty years ago, scientists were puzzled by changes in the trajectories of deep space probes Pioneers 10 and 11. Somehow both craft, then located in the Kuiper belt, which is situated beyond the orbit of Neptune, appeared to have slowed down slightly. All sorts of theories were advanced to account for the anomaly, including the idea that gravity may be behaving in ways not seen before.
After analysing gargantuan quantities of data, mission engineers determined that heat loss was having a subtle influence on the movements of the probes, in that it was acting a little like a brake. Contact with both vessels had been lost by that stage, so even if a fix could have been devised, it unfortunately could not have been applied.
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astronomy, science, technology
To go where no one has gone before, the limit of the universe
22 March 2024
German animation and design studio Kurzgesagt have been producing excellent informative and educational videos for what seems like half the lifespan of the universe. Let’s hope Peak-Kurzgesagt is a situation that never comes to pass.
Their latest video, the Paradox of an Infinite Universe, covers some heady ground; the concept of a physical edge, or boundary, to the universe. If we could somehow reach such a region, could we press our hand against it, as we can a garden wall? Hmm…
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The time may be now for you, but not someone else
31 January 2024
Well, here we are, the first month of 2024 is at an end. Time is certainly passing by. Or is it? Does time even really exist? In their latest video, Kurzgesagt takes a closer at the idea of time. Spoiler: time may not quite be what you think…
When you move through space, you are also moving through the block. This means time passes differently for different people, depending on how they move through space relative to each other. And this also means that what someone perceives as “now” is a certain cut along the block — a cut that will depend on how fast they are moving. So what you think is “now” is really only your now — there are many different “nows” in the universe and all of them are equally real. This also means there is no universal past or future.
This is heavy…
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