two fish

   Gliese 876 – Howdy Neighbor

Extrasolar Life Briefing
3,000+ visible galaxies (Hubble Telescope)
100 billion stars in the Milky Way
20-50% of stars may have planets
1-5 planets per star may be capable of sustaining some life
Expected lifetime of Sun and Earth: 10 billion years
Credit: NASA

This newly discovered planet is about seven times the mass of Earth, and therefore the smallest extrasolar planet found to orbit a main sequence, or “dwarf” star (stars that burn hydrogen).

Although this new planet is advertised as Earth-like because of its relatively low mass, earthlings wouldn’t want to rent a house there any time soon. For one thing, the house would melt. The surface temperatures estimated for this planet - 200 to 400 degrees Celsius (400 to 750 degrees Fahrenheit) - are due to the planet’s kissing-close distance from its star.

Gliese 876 is a close neighbor at only 15 light years away,
and located near the constellation Aquarius. A 10th magnitude star,
it is too faint to be seen with the naked eye, so a telescope is needed
to see it in the sky.
Red arrow below Aquarius.

The planet resides a mere 0.021 AU from the star Gliese 876 (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun), and completes an orbit in less then two Earth days. The closest planet to the sun in our own solar system - blazing hot Mercury - is nearly 20 times further away, orbiting at about 0.4 AU.

“Because the planet is in a two-day orbit, it is heated to oven-like temperatures, so we do not expect life,” says science team member Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

In our solar system, the habitable zone - the temperate region where water could exist as a liquid on a planet’s surface -is roughly 0.95 to 1.37 AU, or between the orbits of Venus and Mars. The star Gliese 876 is about 600 times less luminous than our sun, so the proposed habitable zone is much closer in, roughly between 0.06 and 0.22 AU.

   Super earth sought and found

Extrasolar Earther
Alien KathleenX
(encased in spun super-gravity body tube)

From a 27 Jan book review by David Bodanis of Einstein Defiant: Genius versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution, by Edmund Blair Bolles (Joseph Henry Press).

. . . Until 1915, for example, astronomers had to just accept that there were certain inexplicable shifts in the way that the planet Mercury traveled around the sun. Only when Einstein published his theory of general relativity did he show that Mercury was in fact following simple laws. If something seems unclear, at all random, it’s because we haven’t managed to look deeply enough beneath the surface.

But as the months went on, Heisenberg and even Born kept on insisting that there was no deeper reality that explained what was happening inside the atom. All we could possibly know, they contended, was that when a certain amount of energy was pushed into an atom, there were varying likelihoods that certain results – such as particular flashes of light – would come out.

Einstein was beside himself. It was obvious to him that this had to be wrong. “I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction.” But however much he tried to prove his belief, other physicists kept on finding evidence that backed up Heisenberg’s view. Before too long, this led to Heisenberg developing his famous uncertainty principle, which made clear just how impossible it was to ever have full information about every aspect of an electron’s instantaneous movement.

Bolles has written the best popular account I know of this central episode in 20th-century thought: the intense struggles between Einstein and other physicists – especially the kindly, shambling, yet brilliantly dogged Niels Bohr – about whether the universe could really be constructed with “gaps” in direct causality at its very core. The decades’ worth of letters between Einstein and his intimate friend Born, first published in 1971 and now reissued with a new preface by American scholars Kip Thorne and Diana Buchwald, is an immensely readable personal account of those debates. They provide even more depth to ongoing efforts to determine what “The Old One” – as Einstein referred to his understanding of God – had intended for our universe.

Gradually the world’s leading physicists moved away from Einstein’s view, and most of them considered him a relic by the time he moved to Princeton in the 1930s. One great thinker who did continue to take him seriously was Kurt Gödel, a quirky, brilliant logician, who had looked at the foundations of his own field – mathematical logic – much as Einstein had looked at the foundation of physics. Together, the two old men would take long regular walks in Princeton. Palle Yourgrau’s A World Without Time captures the mood of that autumnal friendship, as well as showing – though in a manner too technical for the ordinary reader – how Gödel developed musings that Einstein also had about the nature of time.

Was Einstein right about there being an explanation for everything if we look into it deeply enough? For decades almost all physicists were convinced he was totally wrong. More recently, there have been hints that aspects of what he had in mind might well hold. In some final letters to Born, when they were both ill and old, Einstein told his friend of his feelings about it all:

“I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret [my resistance] as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one.”

A tipping point, brought to my attention by my friend Jeff:

Val Valerian writes:

Earther vs. Earthling

If you live on Earth, you’re an Earther. Earthling is a derogatory term used by Dark aliens and accepted by fools as real. Think of duckling – a baby duck; hatchling – a helpless newborn from the egg. The origin is from the reptilians who look on Earthers as food/slaves/surrogates. The -ling addition says how they look on Earthers as under them, children to be ‘taken care of’ (that’s another topic). As long as you allow that term by using it or not correcting others who do use it, the vibration of the term will continue. There have been some efforts made to change that. In the Babylon 5 series, for example, people were always Earthers. For some reason, in Star Trek, Earthers are never called such, but rather humans, making it sound like ‘all humans’ live on Earth!

In order to uncover the true history of human endevor, the relatively overlooked topic of duck psychology must be studied:

Probably the most balanced Ducks are those who belong to the Loyal Nests. They have no illusions of a great history and do not try to be what they are not. They simply live their lives and try to be as happy as they can. It is only when Ducks mingle with outsiders that their natural inferiority complex comes into play and they try to escape through swagger, bluster or cunning and deceit.

     

an amazing picture of the new moon – click here

ancient moon
Li Lei, Gallery of China

today’s moon
NASA, photo by Akira Fujita

 
 

A couple of quick downloads for this Christmastime full moon.

1) a beautiful jpg from NASA

2) This free javascript ‘moon phase’ html for your webpage:

3) Update - here is a larger page with beautiful composite realtime phases and full moon / new moon times

4) complete realtime rendering of sun disk, earth day/night and moon disk.

Sometimes, certain questions have to be asked, if only to ask if they have been asked. Google searches some 6-billion-pages these days, the search string “fish on other planets” seemed worth a try. Rewarded by a hit from an AI forum, “language, mind and consciousness,” which in large part quotes Sir Arthur Eddington’s The Philosophy of Physical Science (1967, p.16; first-publication 1939).

A mention about the AI forum foundation statement:

The manipulation of natural human language by a computer, a major research track inside artificial intelligence, at first seemed like a highly tractable problem, but slowly revealed itself to be prohibitively difficult. The research of language acquisition is today central to the science of AI. How do people acquire language? And how could computers? Is there such a thing as a “universal grammar ? And why is it that machines just don’t understand? The science and philosophy of language are the heart of AI.

Sounds promising, and especially as regards the possibility of extraterrestrial fish ("Few listen when Hoagland talks about the face on Mars. But fish on Europa? That’s a creditable, if fanciful, possibility"). The thread “but is it science” was started by the post below:

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the ususal manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations:

[1] No sea-creature is less than two inches long.

[2] All sea-creatures have gills.

These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it.

In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science.

An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. ‘There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them.’ The ichthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. ‘Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of ichthyological knowledge, and is not part of the kingdom of fishes which has been defined as the theme of ichthyological knowledge. In short, ‘what my net can’t catch isn’t fish.’ Or – to translate the analogy – ‘If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science. You are a Metaphysician. Bah.!

Arthur Eddington, The Philosophy of Physical Science.

“What my net can’t catch isn’t fish.” Rob Hoogers, who wrote the post, adds, “Still a very good parable, even after all these years.” He adds:

But is fishing with dynamite or ultrasound fishing? Does hanging nets above sea-level have any chance of catching those elusive ‘flying fish’, and if so, are these fish in the accepted sense? Do fish object to us fishing them? Do fish bred in captivity have the same animal rights as free fish? Would there be fish on other planets?

These questions must be asked. The questions have been asked. Questions like, what kind of net, what kind of fish, what kind of science? evolve naturally from contemplatiing fish on other planets. As can be seen, the conundrum of fish on other planets, the nature of scientific investigation and the primary nature of artificial intelligence are closely linked.

Impression, Rajiv Lather’s, horizon (Frogpond Journal 26:3, Fall 2003)

Impression, Ban’ya Natsuishi’s A Future Waterfall: 100 Haiku from the Japanese (Red Moon Press, 1999)

In a twenty-first century equivalent of Kitty Hawk, exactly 100 years after the Wright Brothers launched their powered craft (December 17), the first powered test of SpaceshipOne occurred. Burt Rutan with SpaceshipOne has now done something spectacular: sent a person into space – 212,000 feet in altitude, almost 41 miles. Check out the photos page. From here in Japan, surprisingly, neither BBC nor CNN covered the launch event, beyond one-sentence mentions. Rutan’s birds are avant-garde aesthetic marvels.

The cost of the SpaceshipOne project is estimated at $25 million. A single NASA space shuttle flight costs an estimated $500 million. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft has spent “tens of millions” on the project.

The Ansari X Prize:

The step-by-step SpaceShipOne missions are keyed to winning the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million purse offered by the X Prize Foundation of St. Louis. For the cash prize, however, the clock is running: The $10 million purse expires Jan. 1, 2005. The Ansari X Prize money is to be awarded to the first company or organization to launch a vehicle capable of carrying three people to a height of 62.5 miles (100 kilometers), then return safely to Earth, and repeat the flight with the same vehicle within two weeks. Twenty-seven teams from around the globe are vying for the Ansari X Prize contest. The competition is modeled on the $25,000 Orteig Prize — won by Charles Lindbergh after winging his Spirit of St. Louis airplane solo from New York to Paris in 1927.

Rutan is also the designer of Designer of Voyager - the first airplane to circle the world non-stop without refueling.

One very cool .wav file lasting 5 seconds. The following article claims the universe started with a low moan. Untrue! It’s a bit less definable (even 50 octaves up). Note, sound waves could propogate through the early universe. Amazing stuff:

The Universe began not with a bang but with a low moan, building into a roar that gave way to a deafening hiss. And those sounds gave birth to the first stars… The variations in the cosmic background radiation expose the relative clumpiness of the early cosmos at a variety of different scales. These density variations began as quantum fluctuations in the moments after the big bang, and then propagated out as sonic waves… Translating the observed frequency spectrum directly to sound yields tones far too low for ears to hear - some 50 octaves below middle A - but transpose the score up all those octaves and you can listen to it… You can listen to the sound from the first million years after the big bang here (500Kb .wav file).

Whittle played the soundtrack at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Denver last week. Contrary to its name, the big bang began in absolute silence. But the sound soon built up into a roar whose broad-peaked notes corresponded, in musical terms, to a “majestic” major third chord, evolving slowly into a “sadder” minor third, Whittle explained. For those worried that you cannot have sounds in space, that is true today, but it was not so in the Universe’s infancy. For perhaps its first million years, the Universe was small and dense enough that sound waves could indeed travel through it - so efficiently, in fact, that they moved at about half the speed of light.

New Scientist June 12.

     After reading a review of the Lombard consensus, appearing in the New York Times today, it became clear that some thought experiments are perhaps pathetically timid. “Liberal” seems to be creeping back into the speakable lexicon, but “visionary” has some way to go.

What would you do with $50 billion?… Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and environmental iconoclast, brought eight economists, including three Nobel Prize winners… to rank the world’s 10 worst problems. Forget politics, they were told, just look at how to get the most bang for the buck… Global warming is a serious problem, the group concluded, but regarded every proposal as having costs that were likely to exceed the benefits.

The $50 billion question isn’t bogus, but it operates from a set of intrinsic limitations: conceptual, procedural and economic. There may also be bias, in that acclaimed professionals, if suggesting far-out, visionary ideas, based on possibles and supposeds run the risk of being labeled cranks. While the report seems valuable in terms of certain actualities, there are many unknowns that cannot be easily addressed by isolated programs with limited budgets.

I wonder what answers might be found if we provided a different set of guidelines for a new thought-experiment:

1. You have an unlimited amount of money.
2. You have 50 years to implement your proposals.
3. Your target solution concerns, at a minimum, the 7th generation from the present, in terms of time.
4. You must collaborate with at least two specialists from research fields other than your own.
5. Consider non-zero sumness as a highest value in weighting possible solutions (non-zero-sumness is a higher value than economic gain, though related to it).
6. Non-zero sum proposals which extend beyond the 7th generation receive a proportionally higher rating, vis their effect through extended time.

Non zero sum is based on Richard Wright’s thesis in Nonzero.

Solar Power via the Moon is a concept untouched by the Lombard wunderkinder; only one possible concept for re-inventing the intra-ecospheric paradigm. Lest quackery is pondered, examine the well-discussed article and testimony of Dr. David R. Criswell: Senate Hearing on Lunar Exploration (Criswell’s biography here). A good idea? Unclear. Possible idea? I’m not saying I approve of the above solution; there are environmental concerns and other questions. But I doubt truly visionary projects were considered by the Lomborg-funded group. People like Buckminster Fuller imagined new visions for humanity, new paradigms, with roaring courage. We need to continue looking into the farther future in as non-zero-sum a manner as possible, I ponder. What would be the result of a worldwide, low-cost, renewable energy source? Where to begin? Perhaps, beyond ourselves:

I am reminded of a comment made by the Buddhist teacher Guru Amrit Desai, when he looked out of his car window and saw that he was in the midst of a gang of Hell’s Angels. After studying them in great detail for a long while, he finally exclaimed, “They really love their motorcycles.” There was no disdain in this observation. Guru Desai was truly moved by the purity of their love for the beauty and power of something that was outside themselves,

Ray Kurtzweil recently remarked, reviewing Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. Whether cellular automata rule 110 is the ultimate reductive answer to the question of life in the universe, as 42 was for the computer Deep Thought, built by pan-dimensional mice in Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, only time will tell. The Hell’s Angels might have been consulted by the Lombardians, in this regard:

The Menace is loose again… the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches… like Genghis Kahn on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter’s leg with no quarter asked and none given… Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on (Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels p. 1).

We’re the one-percenters, man – the one percent that don’t fit in and don’t care.

We were apes reaching for bones, now the stars. Cyberspace is cool.