Interstellar Travel Is Hard, Why Bother? (Imagine an island long, long ago, in an ocean far, far away…) Intercontinental travel will never happen. The nearest shore is thousands of miles away. This means that even if we had the ability to row five miles per day from our little island, it would take years to get there! To rub (sea) salt into the wound, the nearest shoreline is probably not a place we’d want to visit anyway.
We’ve heard that beasts of unimaginable horror lurk over the horizon. To put it bluntly, our little island is quarantined from the rest of the world. Forget about it. Just go home. Dreaming Interstellar Whether you live on that little imaginary island or living on a planet in an empty region of the Milky Way, the arguments are similar. But for mankind to become interstellar, the motivations are a lot less clear and the technologies needed are less certain. Centauri Dreams‘ Paul Gilster wrote an excellent rebuttal of Frank’s musings, it’s well worth the read. Evolutionary Interstellar? A Starship Future? Looking Back: The Wonders We Didn’t Expect.
Paul Saffo It has been a wild ride of a century full of expected wonders. Molecular manufacturing became a reality well before 2050, turning all sorts of once-valuable materials into commodities, and yes, we even eventually got flying cars. But the century also with came a rich harvest of utterly unexpected surprises and the stubborn persistence of some things we thought had been left behind in the twentieth century. Here are a few of the outcomes you never guessed back in 2012: Ownership is so twentieth century.
The result is a new societal divide between the chronological haves and have-nots: The wealthy “old turtles” move at a stately pace, making long-term plans, while the “may-fly” poor die out decades earlier. Life everywhere, but where’s ET? We also stopped counting Earth-like planet discoveries early in the twenty-first century, but astoundingly, we still have no clear evidence of ETs—extraterrestrial life forms that we can communicate with—despite a century of searching. What a Plant Knows. By Maria Popova How a plant can tell whether you’re wearing a blue or red shirt as you’re approaching it. As I was planting my seasonal crop of tomatoes last month, a good friend (and my personal gardening guru) informed me that they liked their leaves rubbed, “like petting a pet’s ears,” which I received with equal parts astonishment, amusement, and mild concern for my friend.
But, as Tel Aviv University biologist Daniel Chamovitz reveals in What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (public library), that might not be such a crazy idea after all. A key reason why plants have evolved such complex sensory system is that, unlike us and our fellow animals, they can’t escape a bad environment, pursue a good one, run away when danger approaches, or get up for a glass of water. Their “rootedness,” which keeps them immobile, is an enormous evolutionary constraint and, like all such constraints, responsible for a great many adaptations.
Chamovitz explains: Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Remember How Tiny We All Are : Starts With A Bang. “The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine.” -James Irwin With everything that goes on in this world, from our daily lives to concerns around the globe, it’s easy to forget just how vast the Universe is, and how small we all really are.
You had so much fun playing with the Interactive Scale of the Universe tool a couple of weeks ago that I had to just give you a few things to ponder. Image credit: Windows to the Universe, Randy Russell, SOHO/ESA/NASA/JPL/U. of Arizona. The entirety of our planet, immense in both size and mass, is tiny compared to the Sun. But in the context of the Milky Way, our Sun — and even the entire Solar System — pales in comparison. Image credit: Brown, Trujillo, and Rabinowitz. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. You. Remember how big this Universe is, and how tiny we all are. Greetings from the Children of Planet Earth : Universe. In 1977, NASA sent a pair of unmanned probes named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space.
Among the infrared spectrometers and radio receivers included on each probe were identical copies of the same non-scientific object: the Voyager Golden Record. Sheathed in a protective aluminum jacket, the Record is a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images chosen to portray the diversity of life on Earth: bird calls, whale songs, the sounds of surf, wind, and thunder, music from human cultures, and some 55 greetings in a range of languages, alive and dead. Like lonely time capsules, the records, aboard their still-functioning hosts, have long since left our solar system. The official Voyager 2 Twitter reports that the probe is currently at 13 hrs 38 mins 08 secs of light-travel time from Earth, which makes it the farthest man-made object from Earth. And neither, of course, are we. As a species, the messages we’ve sent into space are piecemeal.
We’re warring, inconsistent. Dr. ...But What If There Was More Time? : Starts With A Bang. “Well you run and you run to catch up with the Sun but it’s sinking,racing around to come up behind you again.The Sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,shorter of breath and one day closer to death.” -Pink Floyd For the last four-and-a-half billion years, the Earth has spun on its axis, orbiting its parent star: our Sun. Today, our home planet looks something like this. Image credit: Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC. Looking at our world, even from outer space, you see some very familiar features that we think of as essential parts of our world. No; huge swaths of our Earth’s land is transformed by the color of the life that dwells upon it.
Image credit: Juan Manuel, a.k.a. The way we got here is a remarkable story in its own right. Image credit: Planet Dinosaur. We’ve gone from fish to insects to reptiles and dinosaurs to (eventually) birds and mammals. Image credit: Joel Cayford. Image credit: Christian Jégou. What, that’s it? Yes, that’s it. Happy Future Day! March 1st, 2012 Marks the Start of this Soon to be Great Tradition. Celebrate Change! March 1st, 2012 – Today is the best Future Day that’s ever been. It’s also the only Future Day that’s ever been, but that’s besides the point. Future Day is the new holiday focused on celebrating all the wonderful possibilities, responsibilities, and joys that await us in the years ahead. Conceived of by Humanity+, this first annual event may yet to be in the public conscious, but it’s starting off with a bang.
There are local events to be held in major cities all over the globe including Sydney, Hong Kong, Berkeley, Washington, Sao Paolo, Brussels, and Paris. Of course, it’s only fitting for such a forward-thinking holiday to be celebrated online as well, so there will be a special gathering in the virtual realm of Second Life with guest speakers like AI specialist Ben Goertzel, telecomm entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, and transhumanist Natasha Vita-More.
One day its supporters hope Future Day will be celebrated in schools, businesses, and homes all across the world. What? NYC to create the world’s first underground green space. Q&A with Filmmaker Jason Silva as He Preaches the Philosophy of the Singularity. Wednesday Debate --'The Cosmic Connection' "We are like the inhabitants of an isolated valley in New Guinea who communicate with societies in neighboring valleys (quite different societies, I might add) by runner and by drum. When asked how a very advanced society will communicate, they might guess by an extremely rapid runner or by an improbably large drum. They might not guess a technology beyond their ken. And yet, all the while, a vast international cable and radio traffic passes over them, around them, and through them...
"We will listen for the interstellar drums, but we will miss the interstellar cables. . - Carl Sagan, "The Cosmic Connection" What do you think? Image above is dwarf galaxy is called SagDEG (for Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy. How Ignorance Fuels Science and the Evolution of Knowledge. By Maria Popova “We judge the value of science by the ignorance it defines.” “Science is always wrong,” George Bernard Shaw famously proclaimed in a toast to Albert Einstein. “It never solves a problem without creating 10 more.” In the fifth century BC, long before science as we know it existed, Socrates, the very first philosopher, famously observed, “I know one thing, that I know nothing.” Some 21 centuries later, while inventing calculus in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton likely knew all there was to know in science at the time — a time when it was possible for a single human brain to hold all of mankind’s scientific knowledge.
Fast-forward 40 generations to today, and the average high school student has more scientific knowledge than Newton did at the end of his life. The tools and currencies of our information economy, Firestein points out, are doing little in the way of fostering the kind of question-literacy essential to cultivating curiosity: Real science is a revision in progress, always. What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions. By Maria Popova “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious — the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
“We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology,” Carl Sagan famously quipped in 1994, “and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster.” Little seems to have changed in the nearly two decades since, and although the government is now actively encouraging “citizen science,” for many “citizens” the understanding of — let alone any agreement about — what science is and does remains meager. So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? Stuart Firestein writes in the excellent Ignorance: How It Drives Science: Real science is a revision in progress, always.
Science does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. Carl Sagan echoed the same sentiment when he remarked: Later: Edge : Conversations on the edge of human knowledge. Future Timeline | Technology | Singularity | 2020 | 2050 | 2100 | 2150 | 2200 | 21st century | 22nd century | 23rd century | Humanity | Predictions | Events. New passenger service to the Moon for $100M. Excalibur Almaz has announced that it is selling tickets to lunar orbit. The price is $100 million. Your golden ticket will entitle you to a complete astronaut experience. You'll begin with astronaut training: not just a course on how to make it to the escape capsule in the event of an emergency, but also how to pilot the spacecraft back to Earth in the event that something goes wrong with its onboard navigation.
The price includes a ticket to a flight to space aboard the XCOR Lynx suborbital spaceplane, so you'll have already been to space and experienced weightlessness before you board the Excalibur reusable capsule. On the big day you'll ride the Soyuz rocket with your two fellow passengers up from Baikonur to one of the company's two 90-cubic-meter space stations. Excalibur Almaz has based its business around a fleet of Soviet spacecraft purchased by its somewhat-legendary founder, Art Dula of Houston, Texas, who has been involved with several other successful space companies.
The Many Names of Mars. The Secret to Writing Your Dissertation. “I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o’clock the next morning I was up writing again.” -Abraham Pais, physicist You’ve been in graduate school for many years now, and you’ve come a long way. Image credit: East Tennessee State University's Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
You’ve probably even gotten some papers published along the way, with a handful of them (if you’re lucky) with you as the lead author! While there are many guides on how to do that, many of them are either jokes… Image credit: Flickr user chnrdu. …or people grossly overstating the task in front of you. Image credit: Jorge Cham of PhDcomics. First off, here is a list of what your Ph.D. dissertation is not: Image credit: Peter Lubbers / Rocky Lubbers of What is a Ph.D. dissertation, then?
Image credit: Dalhousie University. What do I mean? Things Carl Sagan taught me. Up Goer Five. So just what is out there beyond the Standard Model? “Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me.” -Craig Ferguson Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate — albeit not incredibly precisely — which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to colliders (such as the LHC) go. In other words, unless we get hit by a big physics surprise, the LHC will become renowned for having found the Higgs Boson and nothing else, meaning that there’s no window into what lies beyond the Standard Model via traditional experimental particle physics.
Image credit: Fermilab, modified by me. But that by no means is the same thing as saying “the Standard Model is all there is.” What else is out there? Image credit: NASA, ESA, CFHT, and M.J. 1.) If dark matter is a particle — and the way it appears to clump and cluster strongly suggests that it is — it must be a particle beyond the standard model. 2.) 3.) Why not? Image credit: John Rowe Animation. 4.) 5.) ‘White smells’ are to odors what white noise is to sound. The featureless soundscape known as white noise is effectively as neutral as music can get for humans—too many frequencies are combined in one waveform and the human ear just isn't able to pick any specific detail out. The same thing happens with white light, which contains all the colours of the visual spectrum.
Now it seems that it's possible to create "white smells"—that is, smells that don't smell of anything specific. White noise isn't just a hum in the background—it specifically refers to a kind of frequency spectrum that's completely flat (and Wired.co.uk has previously explored the different "colors" of sound). Every frequency has the same energy, so the noise just kind of melts into an overall hum of nothingness. White smell works on the same principle. Weiss and her team first derived a range of 86 "monomolecular odorants" which covered the effective spectrum of smell. That left them with 191 individual batches for their 56 study participants to have a sniff at. Giving thanks for our place in the Universe. “We live in an atmosphere of shame.
We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw All that is real about ourselves is nothing to be ashamed about; quite to the contrary, it’s something to be eminently thankful for. This very existence is all we have, and while it’s minuscule compared to the entire Universe, it required the entire Universe to bring us to the point where it’s possible for us to exist. What do I mean by that? I mean that everything we’ve ever known about our existence owes its origins to something far grander than our experiences here on Earth would have us believe. Image credit & copyright: Leonard Eisenberg, 2008, of (The turkey that many of us will be eating tomorrow is perhaps our 160,000,000th cousin, some 50,000,000 times removed.)
Image credit: ESA / Rosetta Spacecraft. A Visual History of Nobel Prizes and Notable Laureates, 1901-2012. The Universe Beyond Our Reach. The Overview Effect and the Psychology of Cosmic Awe. New Software Makes Synthesizing DNA As Easy As ‘Drag and Drop’ With Icons. String Theory Finally Does Something Useful | Wired Science. Richard Feynman on the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society. A Spectacular Chance for Gravitational Waves. Geology and Genesis: how Noah’s flood shaped ideas but not landscapes. Carl Sagan's Childhood Drawing of His Vision of Outer Space. Curiosity Fires Up the "Science Lab" --Begins Its Search for Life at Gale Crater. Carl Sagan’s Message to Mars Explorers, with a Gentle Warning | Brain Pickings. How Big Is Infinity? An Animated Explanation from TED. This is why we must invest in ourselves! Curiosity lands on Mars. The Solar System's Missing Boundary. What questions are keeping astronomers up at night? Earthshine. What is this all about?
Epic Breakthrough? A New Form of Quantum Matter Created. Teen Solves Quantum Entanglement Problem for Fun | Wired Enterprise. Enough Luminosity For A Higgs Discovery! Now that we’ve got the Higgs, what’s next? How the Higgs gives Mass to the Universe. What is the Higgs boson and why does it matter? - physics-math - 13 December 2011. Cern scientists announce Higgs boson discovery - video | Science.
Hot Box: Explaining the Higgs boson. Two New Alien Planets Discovered in Andromeda --"Resets the Bar for Weird" NewsAlert: NASA Discovers a Water World --A 'New Species' "Unlike Any Planet We Know Of" How Fast Are You Moving When You Are Sitting Still? So, you've learned that the Sun is going to explode... : Starts With A Bang. Rogue Warp-Speed Planets Escaping Milky Way at 30-Million MPH!
Huge 'Ocean' Discovered Inside Earth. A Brief History of Alchemy, Pseudoscience, and Transmutations, from Ancient China to Craig Venter. Cargo Cult Science: Richard Feynman's 1974 Caltech Commencement Address on Integrity. E.O. Wilson's Advice to Young Scientists. Neil deGrasse Tyson on Why We're Wired for Science and How Originality Differs in Science and Art. Happy 100th Birthday, Alan Turing: Church, State, and the Tragedy of Gender-Defiant Genius. Ray Bradbury on Space, Education, and Our Obligation to Future Generations: A Rare 2003 Interview. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The Dalai Lama on Science and Technology.
The Detailed Universe: This will Blow Your Mind. Powers of Ten. 12 Visualizations That Will Change the Way You View Scale in Your World. The Scale of the Universe. How Big is the Entire Universe? How Big Is Our Galaxy? Cosmologists Try to Explain a Universe Springing From Nothing.
It's supposed to hurt to think about it! : Starts With A Bang. ‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss. 7 Must-Read Books on Time. Responses | 2012 Annual Question | Edge. The Most Distant, Dark Galaxy Ever Found! : Starts With A Bang. The Universe - Redshifts. Redshift and Distance in the Expanding Universe : Starts With A Bang.