Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
24-09-2017
SETI scientist lists seven places microbial life could be found in space
SETI scientist lists seven places microbial life could be found in space
If you go back around a hundred years in time you’ll find that speculation about extraterrestrial life was rampant, much like today. However, in 2017, our expectations of finding life in the solar system are much more measured than they were for our ancestors. No more theories of lakes on Mars dug by the Martian race or Dinosaurs walking on a balmy Venus.
Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, which is currently on the lookout for alien signals coming from the depths of space, has run through the most likely places we will find simple microbial life in our solar system; the list includes places we’re already exploring but also other places we’ve only taken photos of, on flyby missions.
First on the list, is Mars. The red planet is the most extensively searched place that features on the list, we’ve sent crafts to orbit the planet, we’ve landed rovers to learn more about the terrain of the planet and now we are preparing to land people on the surface. Shostak believes there could be life forms hidden under the dusty surface of Mars, about 30 meters down or below, where some liquid water may also be present.
Next up we have three of the four Galilean moons that orbit around Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Io is a fiery volcano planet so it’s not considered to be particularly hospitable to life, however, the remaining three, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede have potential. According to Shostak, Europa’s subsurface oceans could host life which might survive using the hotspots at the bottom of the oceans which are like “little mini volcanoes and that would give you energy for life.” Both Ganymede and Callisto also host oceans but Europa remains the most likely place for life.
The next location is Saturn, where two of its moons, Titan and Enceladus, could potentially harbor life. Although less well known than Europa, Enceladus is one of the most likely places where life could be found and it turns out that it’s not so hard to find out either. Shostak said “it’s shooting geysers into space. So you don’t have to land. You don’t have to drill. You just go grab some of [that] geyser gunk and bring it back to Earth and maybe you’ll find aliens.” Titan, on the other hand, has liquid lakes of natural gas, so it could also sustain life.
The final candidate that Shostak put forward was Pluto. We’ve only just got decent pictures of the dwarf planet thanks to a flyby. Shostak hypothesizes that there are pockets of liquid water underneath the surface of Pluto which means it could also host microbial life.
When asked whether we’ll find extraterrestrial intelligent life, Shostak replied that it might be found in the next two decades. “There’s a lot of real estate out there, right? There are a trillion planets in the Milky Way. We can see a trillion other galaxies, each with a trillion planets. If they’re not out there, then all these people behind us are really special.”
It may seem impossible to discover extraterrestrial intelligent life in the next 20 years, but considering the leaps that human technology has made over just the past two decades, it could be possible, or perhaps it's just a hopeful bias.
NIBIRU SIGHTING? Does this video show Planet X UFOs arrive for end of the world?
NIBIRU SIGHTING? Does this video show Planet X UFOs arrive for end of the world?
NIBIRU did not arrive in the skies on September 23 for the apocalypse, but new video evidence has come to light, suggesting that Planet X UFO’s may have come to Earth instead.
As the Planet X craze swept through the world on Saturday, thousands of conspiracy theorists and doom mongers were convicted that the world was about to end.
However 24 hours later the world still stands right where it was, and no sighting of Planet X has been reported. Or has it?
The mysterious Planet X, known also as Nibiru, is a mystical planet hidden behind the solar system that allegedly orbits the sun every 3,600 years.
The colossal planet – 10 times the size of Earth – was believed to appear in the skies yesterday to collide with Earth or signal the start of the apocalypse.
But video footage filmed in the dead of night supposedly shows that the Planet X theory may have been misunderstood, and Earth was instead visited by extraterrestrials from Nibiru.
Steven St Catherine, a freelance model who recorded the shocking footage after 2am on Sunday morning from the balcony of an apartment block in northwest London, is convinced that he saw UFOs.
Mr Catherine said: “Usually I only see things like that on YouTube and I was on the 15th floor in the high rise blocks and the view is amazing but I know that weren't a plane.”
“Trust me I've never seen nothing like it for my own two eyes,” he said, adding that he spotted five objects in the night sky.
The first of two videos posted to Facebook, was shared with the caption: “I think I saw Nibiru but I got more to freak you out with later, I recorded it on my iPhone just now.”
STEVEN ST CATHERINE FACEBOOK
Planet X: Do these pictures show Nibiru aliens visiting Earth on September 23?
In the video, Mr Catherine pointed his phone at what appeared to be a pulsing light trailing across the night sky.
“Guys look at this yeah?” he says in the footage. “I don’t know what the f*** this is, but I swear to you I can see something in the f****** sky. Listen to me guys, yeah?
“Something’s in the sky guys, yeah. Remember September 23rd? There’s supposed to be a planet going by? I think this might be Nibiru.”
It is unclear just what exactly it was that Mr Catherine caught in the questionable footage. Sceptics would quickly dismiss the light as an aeroplane, drone or something else – but not Nibiru or UFOs.
But a more interesting thing happened in a second video shot by Mr Catherine, where even more bizarre looking lights appear in the sky.
STEVEN ST CATHERINE FACEBOOK
Planet X: Steven St Catherine is convinced that he saw UFOs over London
In the second video he says: “All right I’m with my brother right now and again, I’m seeing something in the f***** sky?
“Now, they’ve been talking about Nibiru. Now, I say this could be a UFO, I don’t know.
Now, they’ve been talking about Nibiru. Now, I say this could be a UFO, I don’t know
Steven St Catherine
“But I know you guys can see something in the sky. I’m taping it… What is going on Rich? This is the second one. Rich, this is the second one. What is this?
“Guys I’m on the phone, an iPhone, and I’m telling you I’ve got something in the sky.”
At this point in the video the man and his brother were startled by the appearance of two identical glowing orbs in the sky.
“Oh my gosh Richie, look at that! There’s two more,” Mr Catherine says.
“Rich what’s going on? What is going on Rich? Rich what the f*** is happening like? Seriously Richie, what’s going on? Ritchie?”
Mr Catherine’s brother responded by yelling out into the quiet night: “Hey yo, yo, yo. Look up! Look at the sky!
“Hey look at the sky! Yo look at the sky! Yo if you can hear me, look at the f****** sky!
STEVEN ST CATHERINE FACEBOOK
Planet X: Nibiru has been debunked by Nasa as nothing more than an online hoax
The video ends with Mr Catherine crying out that he is “not talking no rubbish”.
“I know a lot of people are on the internet talking about like Nibiru, but I say this much, I swear on everyone’s life I saw something in the sky. And I’ve just recorded it.
“Yeah? I’ve got it on my phone. Peace.”
But whether or not Mr Catherine did see a UFO or Planet X pass Earth, is a highly contested debate.
According to Nasa, the whole Nibiru mythology is an elaborate internet hoax that flares up every time someone prophesies the end of the world.
Nasa’s leading scientist Dr David Morrison said: "There is no credible evidence whatever for the existence of Nibiru. There are no pictures, no tracking, no astronomical observations.
"I can quite specifically say how we know Planet X or Nibiru does not exist and does not threaten the Earth.
"Firstly, if there was a planet headed into the inner solar system that was going to come close to the Earth, it would already be inside the orbit of Mars, it would be bright, it would be easily visible to the naked eye - if it was up there it would be easy to see it, all of us could see it.”
Bizarre UFOs Spotted Crossing Surface of Moon through a Telescope
Bizarre UFOs Spotted Crossing Surface of Moon through a Telescope
The reports represent what people have reported to the world as UFO sightings and encounters. This is in no way, shape or forms a release of information that allows the authorities and enthusiasts to examine all that they know about the phenomenon. Although the investigations have obviously been handled more competently and professionally, still those encounters were debunked as a hoax. According to YouTuber Crrow777, he has spent many years of trailing using a high-definition camera via telescope on the moon. The user admitted that he captured a wide array of objects that are passing to the lunar surface. They even included a “boomerang” object.
According to the witness, it is made up of 3 interconnected discs, regular discs, and a strange unevenly-shaped object. Crrow777, who has been narrating in his videos, claims to film the moon through a telescopic lens, for many years. So, he knows well that the UFOs are not insects, birds, or satellites that were soaring much closer to the Earth and had been made an optical illusion as to their shape, size, and dimension. In a promotional blurb for the footage, he added that the footage is a compilation of unidentified objects transiting the moon. But bear in mind that he was a major conspiracy theorist that firmly believes that the moon does not exist, and is a hologram. He even claims that the International Space Station is simply a hoax.
Many conspiracy theorists still believe that the US Government has created secret space craft that can go into space that the people are not told about. So many conspiracy theorists claim the moon is occupied by the aliens, which is why NASA never returned. As you can see, the world of Ufology is quickly garnering an incredible amount of evidence to back up the theory that UFO’s are real and visiting the earth. If pretty much everything information seems a bit far-fetched, don’t doubt an excessive amount. For the non-believers with the UFO concept, it is a good idea that they do watch some real video clippings in the UFO sightings.
Swimmers and Beachgoers Transfixed With Black Ringed UFO
Swimmers and Beachgoers Transfixed With Black Ringed UFO
Every time UFO Researchers and enthusiasts as from their space agency about astronaut unusual phenomenon and encounters, NASA sends out the debunkers. Even though many Astronauts have been coming and has been very honest about what they have witnessed in space, every space agency continually slams the door. More than a few have been lucky enough to hit right between the senses by NASA which claims that the statements brought by the Astronauts were the results of fatigue, depression, and space sickness. But would this recent strange video make any difference?
A new video that has emerged online about an object soaring in the sky over the city’s Jinshitan beach. It shows that the object was floating among the clouds before it disappeared. Swimmers and beachgoers have witnessed the ring as it flew above them. One onlooker Jing Qi said that the strange object has an oval shape and it is expanding and coming towards them closer and closer. Before it disappeared, the ring transformed its shape into a parallelogram. However, users of social media began speculating on the website’s credibility since they were able to trace the possible origin of the object from Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. As per ET Today, several eyewitnesses have suggested that the ring could have been formed through a group of insects that are moving together. Web users, however, were wise to point out a justifiable explanation in connection of being strange due to its sudden appearance.
Despite the reasonable explanations of swimmers, the residents still believe that the ring had been caused by the visual effects of decorations or lights that had just taken place on the beach. Later on, a spokesperson from a local playground has confirmed that the ring was a consequence of a flame from a show organized for the public. They added that the smoke from the special effects has manifested as a strange floating ring in the sky.
7 Lessons 'Star Trek' Taught Us About Life, Leadership and Diversity
7 Lessons 'Star Trek' Taught Us About Life, Leadership and Diversity
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
Photo Credit: Paramount
0. Never Stop Exploring
"Star Trek" is, at its roots, an exploratory series. Whether the crew is exploring a sector by choice, or stranded due to unfortunate accident (ahem, "Voyager"), their primary focus when tooling around the universe is looking for new things and cataloging them. As a whole, although there are exceptions, crews are respectful when meeting with aliens and, if the species happens to be less technologically advanced than themselves, they observe a "Prime Directive" of non-interference.
On the surface, this makes "Star Trek" sound like a boring series — a bunch of pacifists cataloging alien environments — but in reality, there is much more happening underneath the surface. Crews adapt over time and learn from their encounters with various species, sometimes even reflecting on how meeting other cultures makes them feel about their own species. Think about Data ("The Next Generation"), for example: an android who is always observing humans in his quest to become more human-like himself.
1. The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few
Photo Credit: Paramount
That line comes straight out of the moving "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982), which many fans consider to be the best "Star Trek" movie of all time. At the movie's end, Spock exposes himself to deadly radiation, and, while dying, delivers that line to an upset Captain James T. Kirk. While Spock's sacrifice is the most famous, there are many other examples of somebody giving up something to benefit others — and we're not just talking about giving up your life. [Abandon Ship! 'Star Trek' Loves to Destroy the Enterprise]
Think about the number of times that the Enterprise hears a distress call or sees a stranded ship. Usually, they want to rush to the rescue (even if it's to their own crew's detriment, such as being exposed to a nasty disease in "The Original Series" episode "The Naked Time," 1966). Crewmembers not only willingly give up their lives for others, but also give up career or life opportunities. For instance, in "The Next Generation" episode "Sins of the Father" (1990), Worf willingly accepts a traitor accusation on behalf of his family to stop civil war among the Klingons. Worf's decision essentially makes him an exile from his people.
2. Embrace Diversity
Photo Credit: Paramount
"Star Trek" broke barriers with each successive series, which is clear even when taking a quick glance at the main cast. "The Original Series" (1966-69) had a black woman, a Russian (during the Cold War) and an Asian man among the main cast, and is popularly cited as featuring the first interracial kiss. "The Next Generation" (1987-1994) had high female representation, and included episodes dealing with matters such as homosexuality and robot rights. Other series had milestones such as including several aliens in the main cast ("Deep Space Nine", 1993-1999), or featuring a female captain ("Star Trek: Voyager," 1995-2001).
One can argue that "Star Trek" had more leeway in portraying crews this way because it was a science fiction series, but its decisions to embrace diversity still caused some difficulties for cast members. Kate Mulgrew (who played Captain Kathryn Janeway on "Star Trek: Voyager") told a convention audience in 2017 that she was asked repeatedly for her character to have sex, something she felt shouldn't be necessary for a captain. As for the interracial kiss, some reports say that NBC never intended for the Deep South to see it — a decision that fortunately did not come to fruition.
3. Questions the Status Quo
Photo Credit: Paramount
"Star Trek" also wasn't afraid to poke holes in the politics and beliefs of our times. Series creator Gene Roddenberry famously wanted to portray a utopian future where even the crew members did not argue among one another. While "Star Trek" eventually did allow crews to bicker among themselves for dramatic purposes, there are several episodes in every series that challenge viewers to look at their culture and ask themselves what is truly right.
A few examples: "Balance of Terror," 1966 ("The Original Series") was an episode ostensibly about an encounter with the Romulans, but in reality it was showing that the Cold War between the United States and Russia was probably a futile exercise. "Terra Prime," 2005 ("Enterprise") dealt with a terrorist group that created a Vulcan/human hybrid baby to try to incite conflict among Earthlings and Starfleet. "Past Tense, Parts 1 and 2," 1995 ("Deep Space Nine") was a thinly veiled look at class conflict.
4. Lead Boldly, but Also Listen
Photo Credit: Paramount
Every "Star Trek" series has a captain with his or her own distinctive personality; while hard to capture a person in a word, some adjectives to describe each captain could be bravado (Kirk), strategy (Picard), skepticism (Sisko), sarcasm (Janeway) and dutifulness (Archer). Whatever their personality, however, each of these captains certainly occupied the chair with dignity and class — but still willing to admit they needed the help of others to do the job correctly.
For example: In the episode "Detained," 2002 ("Enterprise"), Archer is held captive in a prison and although he has an escape plan, it requires the efforts of the entire crew to get him out of there. "Deep Space Nine" episode "The Visitor," (1995) sees Sisko have a new appreciation of his son after, in an alternate timeline, his son makes a moving sacrifice to help Sisko.
5. In Every Decision, Use Logic and Emotion
Photo Credit: Paramount
"The Original Series" probably had the best-meshing top three crew members: Captain James T. Kirk, Science Officer Spock and Dr. James McCoy, the crew's doctor. Spock was an extremely logical Vulcan alien, while McCoy was an extremely emotional doctor (who often complained that Kirk was asking him to do things outside of his expertise.)
When Kirk made a decision, he would often listen to both sides before deciding what to do. Kirk was also a brilliant strategist, in that he wouldn't just take one side or the other, but would combine logic and emotion to solve a problem. (Or sometimes Kirk would just go his own way anyway, but that was Kirk.)
6. Learn from Entities That are Better Than You
Photo Credit: Paramount
We see this lesson over and over again in the "Star Trek" series simply because there are different specialties among each crew. Uhura ("The Original Series") is famously gifted in linguistics, for example, so her abilities to interpret other languages are respected and used by her crewmates. But in a strategy sense, there is perhaps no better example of improving from your enemies than the various crews' encounters with the Borg. [How 'Star Trek' Technology Works (Infographic)]
The Borg is an enemy that assimilates all aliens it meets into a collective, and they're able to do so because their ships are powerful and their hive mind is good at strategy. But despite their advantage, the humans are able to overcome them on several occasions — sometimes by allying with members of the enemy themselves. For example, the character Seven of Nine ("Voyager") is temporarily re-assimilated back into the Borg during the two-part episode "Dark Frontier" (1999), but uses her insider knowledge to help other crew members escape while placating the Borg queen. In the episode "Collective" (2000), Seven extracts information from the Borg to get the true names of some assimilated children.
7. Life Lessons
Photo Credit: Paramount
Below are seven of the many lessons that "Star Trek" taught us, in honor of the new series "Star Trek Discovery" making its debut Sept. 24. May the series, coming in the 51st year of the "Star Trek" franchise, live long and prosper!
As autumn brings with it cooler temperatures and clearer night skies, Douglas Vakoch, president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), wants you to take the opportunity to survey the glory of our galaxy — and to contemplate the existence of alien life.
“You look at the night sky — virtually all of those stars have planets,” Rosenberg said in an exclusive interview with Futurism. “Maybe one out of five has it at just the right zone where there’s liquid water. And so we know there are a lot of places that there could be life. Now the big question is, are they actually trying to make contact, or do they want us to try?”
METI’s stance is that we should assume the latter, and the collection of scientists have taken it upon themselves to reach out to any potential alien civilizations. In fact, the next transmission planned for next year. However, there have long been voices opposed to this strategy — perhaps the most prominent of which being Stephen Hawking.
Hawking, a noted physicist and author, supports the search for aliens, but regularly cautions against attempting contact. Hawking argued in “Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places,” a video on the platform CuriosityStream, that aliens could be “vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.”
Paying Our Dues?
These are not warnings that Vakoch takes lightly. “Well, when Stephen Hawking, a brilliant cosmologist, has said, ‘whatever you do, don’t transmit, we don’t want the aliens to come to Earth,’ You’ve got to take it seriously,” Vakoch told Futurism.
But there’s one key point that Hawking really doesn’t seem to take into consideration in this assessment, Vakoch said.
It’s the fact that every civilization that does have the ability to travel to Earth could already pick up I Love Lucy. So we have been sending our existence into space with radio signals for 78 years. Even before that, two and a half billion years, we have been telling the Universe that there is life on here because of the oxygen in our atmosphere. So if there’s any alien out there paranoid about competition, it could have already come and wipe us out. If they’re on their way, it’s a lot better strategy to say we’re interested in being conversational partners. Let’s strike up a new conversation.
It’s Vakoch’s belief that humanity’s first contact with alien life will occur within our lifetimes. Butven if it does not, he believes the METI project will be foundational to any relationship our world builds with others.
“Sometimes people talk about this interstellar communication as an effort to join the galactic club. What I find so strange is no one ever talks about paying our dues or even submitting an application. And that’s what METI does,” Vakoch said. “It’s actually contributing something to the galaxy instead of saying gimme gimme gimme me. What can we do for someone else.” e
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute believes that our Solar System could possibly harbour life forms in the microbial level and have listed seven places that are the likely candidates.
Seth Shostak, senior astronomer with SETI, in an interview with Futurism has said that there are "at least seven other places in our own solar system, so kind of next door places you could get to with a rocket, that could have microbial life," adding that it is likely that microbial life is found before intelligent life.
1. Mars
The red planet is one of the first candidates for finding life, notes the report. With more and more information coming out about the planet's chemical and environmental makeup, it might not be too unrealistic to expect to find life there. Nasa recently uncovered a "key ingredient for life" in a fascinating chemical discovery on Mars as they found Boron.
The highest concentration of boron measured on Mars is in this mineral vein called "Catabola,"NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/LANL/CNES/IRAP/LPGNantes/CNRS/IAS
2. Jupiter's moons
Europa is a prime candidate for finding a life within its sub-surface oceans. There are hot spots at the bottom where "little mini volcanoes and that would give you energy for life," said Shostak.
The Europa mission will see a craft landing on the icy moon within the next 15 yearsNASA/JPL-Caltech
Ganymede is the largest moon in the entire Solar System, notes the report and could support life in its ocean beneath the thick ice sheets on the surface.
Callisto is another moon that even has an atmosphere apart from its ocean, says the report.
3. Saturn's moons
Recently it was reported that chemical "precursors" to life was confirmed on Saturn's largest moon, Titan as Nasa found the right chemical setup that can support cell membranes on that moon. According to the Futurism report, there are large liquid lakes that are filled with natural gas and these could be good places to start looking for life.
Another satellite of Saturn– Enceladus is another prime candidate in the search for life and according to Shostak, an even more favourable place for life to form. The report points out that it might be even easier to study life in Enceladus as it shoots plumes of ice into space. "You don't have to land. You don't have to drill," explained Shostak. "You just go grab some of those geyser gunk and bring it back to Earth and maybe you'll find aliens."
Vents and plumes on Enceladus' south pole.NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Mosaic by Emily Lakdawalla
One of the reasons why Cassini spacecraft had to plunge into Saturn was because scientists believed that if there happens to be life on any of its moons, there is a possibility of contamination from Cassini that they needed to avoid.
4. Pluto
Pluto is believed to have pockets of liquid water under its surface and according to Shostak "any place [where] you have liquid water — liquid of any kind — maybe have microbes." It was reported that the New Horizons probe discovered blue skies and red "water ice" on Pluto as well as numerous small, exposed regions of water ice.
The rugged, icy mountains on Pluto are as tall as 11,000 feet highNasa
The report surmises that these seven places in the solar system have the right conditions –not just water– to support life. Shostak said: "You have something that gives you food, fundamentally, and the opportunity to create life, which after all is just organic chemistry."
In a previous report by Futurism, it was noted that there being life on alien planets and actually finding life on those planets are different aspects as humans might not even recognise life that is completely different in form. Earth's atmosphere allows for life that is carbon-based, but planets with atmospheres that have biosignatures made of different other gasses could possibly hold life that is completely unrecognisable to humans.
We think we know what it means when we see certain transit signalsNASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CC BY
Given the current state of our home planet, and indeed our species, it can seem a bit surplus to needs to speculate on whether extraterrestrials are going to one day come and eat us (or, well, you know, do anything equally unpleasant).
Nonetheless, the question of whether there's anyone or anything 'out there' that might ever show up to cause trouble does seem to come around again, and again, and again. For example, it's become a bit of a perennial topic for Stephen Hawking to mention, and he's not alone among serious scientists in speculating on the outcome of any such encounter.
As with any effort to decode the likely thought processes or intents of entirely hypothetical lifeforms, the options are - shall we say - fairly loosely constrained.
I do agree with Hawking's general thinking that if a species goes to all the trouble of undertaking interstellar travel itself (rather than sending robotic scientific probes) the chances are that it wants more than a few nice anecdotes for the next edition of the Really Lonely Planet Guide to the Galaxy.
But contrary to many Hollywood-style sci-fi tales, I doubt that what an alien species needs are most of the usual tropes: water (what, one of the most abundant compounds in the cosmos?), human slaves (seriously, you can traverse interstellar space and you need slaves?), or some mystical 'life-force' to be drained from us all (no, just no).
A semi-plausible motivation would actually be the need for a functional biosphere, because an alien home-world has gone belly-up. Although here too, if you can sustain life on a mothership (for the sake of argument) for what would be at least decades, if not centuries of travel, would the need for a planet be quite so desperate? Maybe it would be. As anyone with half a cup of grey-cells in their head is painfully aware, a planetary ecosystem, replete with chemical recycling, photosynthesis, and moderately stable climate regimes, is actually pretty useful, hard to replicate, and possibly the very best life-support system money can buy.
Of course it's easier to set up a colony if the indigenous lifeforms don't include anything particularly intelligent, so the cost-benefit analysis has to include the effort of handling the locals who might get in your way. Option A is to try to be nice and hope you get asked to co-exist, Option B is to follow the template of what humans have successfully, and desplorably done to each other over the millennia: "I know you were here first, but now it's ours and we're going to make it GREAT (again)".
Which brings me to the real point of this post. If the single greatest motivation for a species to go interstellar, and to show up in a hostile fashion, is because their home system can no longer support them, we should be trying to find those nearby exoplanets where it looks like life is on its way out.
Being able to actually do this is a way off, so bear with me. Suppose though, in the not-so-distant-future, we do have the capability to confirm the presence of a biosphere on an exoplanet, and we have refined our techniques so that we can measure stuff like industrial pollution, climate change, and perhaps even the infra-red excess of active technology. In this case we might be able to gauge the odds that life has messed things up good and proper.
With this information in hand we could go as far as assigning a probability that a technological species on one of these dismal worlds will pack up and come looking for a new home. And, given that this would tell us the best directions to be looking in, we might conceivably be able to pick up signs of an interstellar launch, or deceleration, or other activity.
There you have it. The best way to avoid hostile alien invasion, or at least be forewarned, is to continue funding all that wonderful exoplanetary science; research that will answer a bunch of other critically interesting questions along the way.
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TV-uitzending onderbroken door mysterieuze boodschap over aliens en Armageddon. Dit is hoe mensen erop reageerden
TV-uitzending onderbroken door mysterieuze boodschap over aliens en Armageddon. Dit is hoe mensen erop reageerden
Amerikaanse tv-kijkers keken donderdag raar op toen de uitzending plotseling werd onderbroken door een doembericht.
Geschokte kijkers zagen opeens een noodbericht in beeld komen, waarna een mannenstem waarschuwde voor een buitenaardse invasie en het begin van de Armageddon.
De bizarre waarschuwingen werden uitgezonden in de omgeving van Orange County in de Amerikaanse staat Californië.
Extreem gewelddadige tijd
De onbekende man zei: ‘Besef je dit: we gaan een extreem gewelddadige tijd tegemoet’ en dat ‘de wereld eindigt op 23 september’.
Reddit-gebruiker smittenkitten77 ontdekte dat deze uitspraak was gedaan in het christelijke radioprogramma Insight for Living met Chuck Swindoll.
“Het was net of Hitler aan het woord was,” vertelde Stacy Laflamme aan de Orange County Register. Ze voegde toe: “Het klonk als een radioboodschap die op tv werd uitgezonden.”
Area 51
In een filmpje van de uitzending, dat op YouTube is gezet, wordt gesproken over contact met aliens die het militaire establishment hebben geïnfiltreerd, met name Area 51.
De website Gizmodo wist te achterhalen dat het hier gaat om een boodschap die Art Bell van radioshow Coast to Coast AM in 1997 kreeg van een man die claimde in Area 51 te hebben gewerkt.
Geschrokken
Het is nog onduidelijk of de boodschappen met opzet of per ongeluk zijn uitgezonden. De kabelbedrijven weten niet hoeveel klanten de waarschuwingen te zien kregen.
Er wordt nog onderzocht waar het signaal precies vandaan kwam. Veel tv-kijkers waren naar verluidt erg geschrokken van de uitzending.
Vreemde radioflitsen vinden iedere seconde plaats in het heelal. Zijn dit signalen van aliens?
Vreemde radioflitsen vinden iedere seconde plaats in het heelal. Zijn dit signalen van aliens?
Wetenschappers die speuren naar snelle radioflitsen, volgens sommigen signalen van aliens, zeggen dat ze op ieder moment plaatsvinden.
Snelle radioflitsen zijn signalen die slechts enkele milliseconden duren en om die reden zijn ze erg lastig te vinden. Er is nog niets bekend over de exacte herkomst van dit soort flitsen.
Als het mysterieuze fenomeen een teken van intelligent leven in het universum is, lijken de nieuwste bevindingen te suggereren dat het veel algemener voorkomt dan gedacht.
Iedere seconde
Onderzoekers van het Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) hebben berekend hoe vaak snelle radioflitsen in het waarneembare heelal plaatsvinden.
Uit hun onderzoek blijkt dat er iedere seconde tenminste één radioflits wordt geproduceerd.
Toen de mysterieuze flitsen in 2001 werden ontdekt, hadden astronomen nog nooit eerder zoiets gezien.
Paparazzi
Sindsdien hebben ze enkele tientallen snelle radioflitsen waargenomen, maar ze weten nog steeds niet hoe ze precies ontstaan.
Hoofdonderzoeker Anastasia Fialkov zei: “Als we gelijk hebben over het hoge aantal snelle radioflitsen, kun je de hemel in dit geval vergelijken met paparazzi die foto’s maken van een beroemdheid.”
“Deze flitsen zijn echter niet met het blote oog te zien, maar komen in de vorm van radiogolven,” vervolgde ze.
Honderden
“In de tijd dat jij een kop koffie zit te drinken, zijn er honderden snelle radioflitsen geweest ergens in het heelal,” aldus coauteur Avi Loeb.
“Als we ook maar een fractie van die flitsen goed kunnen bestuderen, zouden we hun herkomst moeten kunnen bepalen,” zei hij.
Mysterious Glowing Orb follows his own flight trajectory over London
Mysterious Glowing Orb follows his own flight trajectory over London
The Orb phenomenon is still a mystery. While, some researchers have agreed that some orbs are the result from natural phenomena such as insects, dust, pollen, or water vapor there is no doubt that some orbs may well be representing something supernatural, a reality that is not yet understood by UFO and paranormal investigators.
Is such an Orb evidence of spirit presences representing the essence or soul of a departed person or is such a luminous sphere something that is under intelligent control of an extraterrestrial race?
While there is a lot that has yet to be explored about this phenomenon, it has been proven that authentic orbs have their own flight trajectory and they emit their own light and that is exactly what Gary Lowe has filmed when he was in his car through Dagenham, Greater London on September 23, 2017.
When Mr. Lowe noticed the object in the sky he then pulled his car over and started to film the glowing object, which erratically darting across the sky and was moving ‘too fast to be explained' without making a sound, reports dailymail.
The Gurdon Light is said to be an eerie white-blue, sometimes orange, glowing light that moves through the trees near the railroad tracks, off Interstate 30 in southern Arkansas.
Local legend has it that the light is the lantern of a railroad worker who fell on the tracks and was beheaded, or in another variation the light of a worker who was killed in a brawl on the tracks. Thought by most to be too far from the highway to be car lights, the light remains a mystery. Some scientists have postulated the possibility of a piezoelectric effect. Piezoelectricity is generated by materials such as certain ceramics and crystals, which when bent or squeezed generate electricity and sparks. A very similar phenomenon (triboluminescence, which generates electricity and light when a material is broken rather then bent as in piezoelectricity) can be seen in the sparks of WintOGreen Lifesavers.
One possible explanation for the Gurdon light is that underground quartz crystals in the area are under constant stress and cause an electric reaction that results in the glow. Unlike other mysterious lights, the Gurdon Light is reported to always be present, but only visible at night. The light has been chronicled by the television show Unsolved Mysteries and remains a Halloween favorite for locals.
About 75 miles south of Little Rock, down Interstate 30, just east of Interstate 67, pull over at the railroad tracks, and walk down the tracks about two miles, crossing four creek bridges. Alternative: It may be difficult to find from I-67. The better way may be to get off I-30 at state road 53 and turn right on a dirt road just before where the tracks cross 53, about half-way from I-30 to down-town Gurdon. The only way to find this spot is to look for the unlabeled tracks crossing 53 on Google maps. There's also a small pull-over on the left (if you're coming from I-30) close to where the tracks used to cross the road (which are now invisible from 53).
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Apocalypse Now? Doomsday Predictions Are Just Recycled Bogus Theories
Apocalypse Now? Doomsday Predictions Are Just Recycled Bogus Theories
By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Contributor
Credit: Igor Zh./Shutterstock
Old doomsday predictions never die. They just get recycled.
Just six years after radio preacher Harold Camping promised the apocalypse, and five years after the end of the Mayan calendar was supposed to extinguish life on Earth as we know it, new doomsday predictions have arrived. This time, they come via YouTube and a man named David Meade, who claims that the first spiritual sign of the apocalypse will arrive today (Sept. 23).
Meade's theories meld biblical prophecy with astronomy. He claims that on Sept. 23, there will be a rare alignment of the sun in the constellation Virgo — with the moon just to the east — with nine stars and three planets (Mercury, Venus and Mars) clustering around the constellation's head, like a crown. This is supposed to be the sign foretold in the beginning of Revelation 12, which reads, in the New International Version of the Bible: "A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth." [Doomsdays: Top 9 Real Ways the World Could End]
The date, Sept. 23, is 33 days after the total solar eclipse that crossed the United States in August. That number is meaningful to Meade because Jesus Christ is said to have been 33 when he died.
This astronomical sign, Meade said, is evidence that the end is near. In October, he said, the mysterious Planet X will pass close to Earth, which will mark the beginning of seven years of Tribulation — a period of time that some say will be full of hardships before the second coming of Christ — followed by the rapture of true believers to heaven and a millennium of peace. [Oops! 11 Failed Doomsday Predictions]
Astronomy plus apocalypse
Meade's theories echo a lot of ideas that have been floating around conspiracy and doomsday circles for years. Planet X, sometimes known as Nibiru, was supposed to have crashed into Earth during the Mayan apocalypse of 2012 or maybe in 2011, or was it 2003? The problem with this idea is that a rogue planet hurtling toward Earth just doesn't exist. The hysteria over the mythical planet got so pitched in 2011 that NASA scientist David Morrison made a YouTube video to explain that Nibiru isn't real, and that if a giant planetary object were zooming through the solar system, it would be easily visible from Earth and easily detectable from gravitational changes in the orbits of planets in our solar system. (Confusing matters, there is a possible "Planet X" beyond Pluto, but astronomers have not proved its existence yet. If it exists, it orbits far at the outskirts of the solar system. "Planet X" is what scientists call possible planets that have yet to be identified.)
Eclipses, too, have long been associated with the end. According to the writings of 16th-century Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, Aztecs made human sacrifices during a total solar eclipse, fearing that if they did not, the darkness would never lift. "It was thus said: 'If the eclipse of the sun is complete, it will be dark forever! The demons of darkness will come down. They will eat men,'" de Sahagún wrote.
The Vikings, too, felt they had to do something to prevent perpetual darkness — in their mythology, a wolf named Skoll was eating the sun, and they had to make noise to scare the monstrous beast away, lest the sun vanish forever.
Total eclipses, though, are visible from someplace on Earth roughly every 18 months. The alignment of the sun in Virgo is not particularly rare, either — it happens once a year, every September. Earth's view of the sun's relationship to the stars simply changes as it moves through its yearly orbit. That's why astrologers developed the concept of the 12-month zodiac.
Nor are the other stellar alignments around Virgo on the 23rd that unusual, according to EarthSky. The moon passes through every constellation of the zodiac throughout the month, so it's regularly just east of Virgo. The crown of 12 stars upon Virgo's head on the 23rd is an arbitrary designation, according to EarthSky, because there are more than nine stars in the constellation Leo, which is supposed to make up the stellar portion of the crown. [Monsters of the Night Sky: Strange Constellations to See in Fall]
What's more, this exact arrangement of stars and planets has happened before, EarthSky found. In the past 1,000 years alone, it occurred in 1827, 1483, 1293 and 1056.
Biblical predictions
Repetition doesn't appear to faze Meade. When asked by Live Science whether the failed Planet X predictions of recent years gave him any pause in his own prognostications, he responded by email, "There's never been a year like 2017. Read my book."
In fact, there's plenty of evidence that failed doomsday predictions don't do much to forestall future "prophets." Nineteenth-century preacher William Miller, founder of the group that would eventually become the Seventh-day Adventists, predicted doomsday in 1843, then in 1844, and died five years later, still thinking the end was nigh. Camping, who took out billboards to advertise the supposed coming apocalypse in 2011, had previously promised the end of the world in 1994. (Camping died in 2013.) In one famous 1954 case, a woman named Dorothy Martin convinced her followers that although the end of the world was coming, a UFO would drop by to save them. When nothing happened on the appointed date, Martin and her followers decided not that they'd been wrong, but that their faith had saved the world from doom. A psychologist who had infiltrated the group wrote about their reaction in the book "When Prophecy Fails" (Harper-Torchbooks, 1956).
"The real tragedy of this kind of thinking is that many people do take it seriously," said Allen Kerkeslager, a comparative religion professor at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. Sometimes a mythical apocalypse really does become the end of the world, at least for believers. Between A.D. 66 and 73, the Jews of Judea revolted against their Roman occupiers, Kerkeslager said, bolstered by prophecies that promised that their struggle was part of a great End Times battle and that God would rescue them at the last minute. God did not, and tens of thousands died.
"There are so many past cases showing that no amount of contrary evidence or failed prophecies will ever deter some of the people who believe that the Bible has codes about an apocalyptic end that will leave their own group triumphant," Kerkeslager told Live Science in an email. "For such people, there is no need to negotiate or compromise in delicate international political crises and arms races, no need to work out peaceful resolutions with countries deemed somehow part of an 'axis of evil,' and no need for concern with environmental problems such as the impact of human-caused climate change on a planet that is going to be destroyed and recreated anyway. So all of this does have very real and very dangerous negative social implications."
Apocalypse everywhere
For most people, it's easy to dismiss Meade, and certainly the idea that the world will enter its last throes tomorrow has no more to back it up than the umpteen failed predictions that came before it. But apocalyptic thinking is everywhere, said Robert Joustra, a political scientist at Redeemer University College in Ontario and co-author of the book "How to Survive the Apocalypse:Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World" ( Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2016).
Postapocalyptic shows like "The Walking Dead" or "The Leftovers" are a secular way of dealing with the same questions that the Book of Revelation would have been written to answer, Joustra said: What is the point of all this suffering? What is the meaning of life? How should we live now, in the midst of all our struggles?
The symbolism in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation would have had a very different meaning to the early, badly persecuted Christians who read it compared to people of the 21st century, Joustra said. They would have taken certain numbers, like 7, to represent perfection and completion, not as an invitation to start pulling out the calculator to predict the date of the rapture. For them, Revelation would have offered a measure of comfort, promising that their suffering under Roman rule would eventually amount to victory and eternal peace.
A more individualistic approach to the apocalypse dominates today's pop culture, Joustra said. Ever since the invention of the atomic bomb, he said, mainstream apocalypse narratives have shifted from something that God will do to something humans will cause. The question then becomes what sort of person an individual will be once you strip away laws, institutions and social mores, he said. [Doom and Gloom: 10 Post-Apocalyptic Worlds]
It's a concept that would have flummoxed the ancients, Joustra said. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotlebelieved that humans were defined by their relationships, institutions and communities. Stripping those things away and then asking what was left would be almost nonsensical, Joustra said.
"It's a much more individualistic way of thinking about human nature and the apocalypse that I think is different from anything else in human history," he said.
THE DOMINANT LIFE FORM IN THE COSMOS IS PROBABLY SUPERINTELLIGENT ROBOTS
THE DOMINANT LIFE FORM IN THE COSMOS IS PROBABLY SUPERINTELLIGENT ROBOTS
If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won’t look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It’s likely they won’t be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction, that is—have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.
Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper “Alien Minds,” written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.
“Most people have an iconic idea of aliens as these biological creatures, but that doesn’t make any sense from a timescale argument,” Shostak told me. “I’ve bet dozens of astronomers coffee that if we pick up an alien signal, it’ll be artificial life.”
With the latest updates from NASA’s Kepler mission showing potentially habitable worlds strewn across the galaxy, it’s becoming harder and harder to assert that we’re alone in the universe. And if and when we do encounter intelligent life forms, we’ll want to communicate with them, which means we’ll need some basis for understanding their cognition. But for the vast majority of astrobiologists who study single-celled life, alien intelligence isn’t on the radar.
“If you asked me to bring together a panel of folks who have given the subject much thought, I would be hard pressed,” said Shostak. “Some think about communication strategies, of course. But few consider the nature of alien intelligence.”
Schneider’s paper is among the first to tackle the subject.
I’m not saying that we’re going to be running into IBM processors in outer space. In all likelihood, this intelligence will be way more sophisticated than anything humans can understand.
“Everything about their cognition—how their brains receive and process information, what their goals and incentives are—could be vastly different from our own,” Schneider told me. “Astrobiologists need to start thinking about the possibility of very different modes of cognition.”
“There’s an important distinction here from just ‘artificial intelligence’,” Schneider told me. “I’m not saying that we’re going to be running into IBM processors in outer space. In all likelihood, this intelligence will be way more sophisticated than anything humans can understand.”
The reason for all this has to do, primarily, with timescales. For starters, when it comes to alien intelligence, there’s what Schneider calls the “short window observation”—the notion that, by the time any society learns to transmit radio signals, they’re probably a hop-skip away from upgrading their own biology. It’s a twist on the belief popularized by Ray Kurzweil that humanity’s own post-biological future is near at hand.
“As soon as a civilization invents radio, they’re within fifty years of computers, then, probably, only another fifty to a hundred years from inventing AI,” Shostak said. “At that point, soft, squishy brains become an outdated model.”
Schneider points to the nascent but rapidly expanding world of brain computer interface technology, including DARPA’s latest ElectRX neural implant program, as evidence that our own singularity is close. Eventually, Schneider predicts, we’ll not only upgrade our minds with technology, we’ll make a wholesale switch to synthetic hardware.
“It could be that by the time we actually encounter other intelligences, most humans will have substantially enhanced their brains,” Schneider said.
Which speaks to Schneider’s second line of reasoning for superintelligent AI: Most of the radio-hot civilizations out there are probably thousands to millions of years older than us. That’s according to the astronomers who ruminate on such matters.
“The way you reach this conclusion is very straightforward,” said Shostak. “Consider the fact that any signal we pick up has to come from a civilization at least as advanced as we are. Now, let’s say, conservatively, the average civilization will use radio for 10,000 years. From a purely probabilistic point of view, the chance of encountering a society far older than ourselves is quite high.”
It’s certainly humbling to consider that we may be galactic infants of beetle-like intelligence compared with our cosmic brethren. But despite their superior processing power, there’s a fundamental aspect of cognition our interstellar neighbors may lack: Consciousness.
It sounds bizarre, but, Schneider writes, the jury’s still out on whether any artificial intelligence is capable of self-awareness. Simply put, we know so little about the neurological basis for consciousness; it’s almost impossible to predict what ingredients might go into replicating it artificially.
“I don’t see any good reason to believe an artificial superintelligence couldn’t possess consciousness, but it’s important to identify the possibility,” said Schneider.
Still, Schneider feels the assertion that artificial life simply can’t possess consciousness is losing ground.
“I believe the brain is inherently computational—we already have computational theories that describe aspects of consciousness, including working memory and attention,” Schneider said. “Given a computational brain, I don’t see any good argument that silicon, instead of carbon, can’t be a excellent medium for experience.”
You don’t spend a whole lot of time hanging out reading books with your goldfish. On the other hand, you don’t really want to kill the goldfish, either.”
I hope she’s right. Somehow, the notion of a galaxy teeming with soulless supercomputers is way creepier than introspective, WALL-E-like beings, or dry, sardonic Qs.
The concept of superintelligent alien AI still sounds very speculative. And it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth consideration. Indeed, expanding our purview of alien intelligence may help us identify life’s fingerprints in the cosmos. “So far, we’ve pointed antennas at stars that might have planets that might have breathable atmospheres and oceans and so forth,” Shostak told me. “But if we’re correct that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is artificial, then does it have to live on a planet with an ocean?”
It’s a bit of a mind-bender to think that habitable worlds may hold false promise when it comes to advanced alien life, but that seems to be Shostak’s conclusion.
“All artificial life forms would need is raw materials,” he said. “They might be in deep space, hovering around a star, or feeding off a black hole’s energy at the center of the galaxy.” (That last idea has seen its way into a number of science fiction novels, including works by Greg Bear and Gregory Benford).
Which is to say, they could be, essentially, anywhere.
Begging a final question: How might superintelligent aliens view us? Will our cosmic cousins see us as nothing more than convenient biofuel, a la the Matrix? Or do they study us quietly from afar, abiding by a Star Trek-esque maxim of non-interference? Schneider doubts either. In fact, she reckons superintelligent aliens couldn’t really care less about us.
“If they were interested in us, we probably wouldn’t be here,” said Schneider. “My gut feeling is their goals and incentives are so different from ours, they’re not going to want to contact us.”
That’s a welcome divergence from Steven Hawking’s claim that advanced aliens might be nomads, looking to strip resources from whatever planets they can, and that all efforts to contact said aliens may end in our own demise.
“I’d have to agree with Susan on them not being interested in us at all,” Shostak said. We’re just too simplistic, too irrelevant. “You don’t spend a whole lot of time hanging out reading books with your goldfish. On the other hand, you don’t really want to kill the goldfish, either.”
So, if we want to meet our galactic peers, it looks like we’ll probably have to keep seeking them out. That may take thousands or millions of years, but in the meanwhile, perhaps we’ll upgrade our own intelligence enough to level the playing field. And as an early Christmas present, it seems we can all tick alien robots juicing us for energy off the list of likely apocalypses.
Since their discovery in 2002, scientists have struggled to understand Fast Radio Bursts—high-energy pulses that originate from galaxies billions of light-years away. Though only a handful of these radio blips have ever been detected, new research suggests they could be a ubiquitous fixture of the cosmos, flashing about once every second throughout the observable universe. It’s an intriguing conclusion, but one lacking in observational data that would lend it support.
Scientists still aren’t sure what causes these powerful bursts of radio emission. The most popular explanation is that they are caused by rapidly spinning neutron stars with extraordinarily strong magnetic fields, known as magnetars. Much more speculatively, these bursts could be produced by an advanced alien civilisation’s antenna ray for light sail propulsion.
What we do know is that at least some FRBs are not produced by catastrophic events, such as a supernova explosion. We know this because of a Fast Radio Burst source known as FRB 121102—an object that’s producing FRBs with surprising regularity. Last month, scientists working on the Breakthrough Listen Project—a 10-year mission to search the skies for signs of extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs)—detected 15 new FRBs from this single source. In total, only 23 FRB sources have been observed so far, pointing to the difficulty of detecting these strange signals.
By applying what we know of FRB 121102 and the other known FRB sources, Anastasia Fialkov and Avi Loeb from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have calculated how many FRBs could exist across the entire sky. The title of their new paper, now published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, pretty much sums up their conclusion: “A Fast Radio Burst Occurs Every Second Throughout the Observable Universe.”
That’s obviously a lot—a conclusion that, if correct, would upend what we know about FRBs.
“If we are right about such a high rate of FRBs happening at any given time, you can imagine the sky is filled with flashes like paparazzi taking photos of a celebrity,” noted Fialkov in a press release. “Instead of the light we can see with our eyes, these flashes come in radio waves.”
Fialkov, who led the study, worked under the assumption that FRB 121102 is representative of all FRBs, an object located in a metal-poor dwarf galaxy about three billion light-years away.
“In our paper we calculated the rate of FRBs in the entire volume of the observable universe and found that it can reach once every second,” Loeb told Gizmodo.
As for they chose to focus their estimate on FRB121102, “FRB121102 is the only FRB for which a host galaxy and a distance were identified,” Loeb said. “It is also the only repeating FRB source from which we detected hundreds of FRBs by now. The radio spectrum of its FRBs is centred on a characteristic frequency and not covering a very broad band. This has important implications for the detectability of such FRBs, because in order to find them the radio observatory needs to be tuned to their frequency.”
“If we are right about such a high rate of FRBs happening at any given time, you can imagine the sky is filled with flashes like paparazzi taking photos of a celebrity."
Loeb says that if we can study even a small fraction of the FRBs like FRB121102, those that occur on a regular basis, we should be able to unravel their origin and answer myriad other questions.
“FRBs can be used to measure the column of free electrons towards their source,” he said. “This can be used to measure the density of ordinary matter between galaxies in the present-day universe. In addition, FRBs at early cosmic times can be used to find out when the ultraviolet light from the first stars broke up the primordial atoms of hydrogen left over from the Big Bang into their constituent electrons and protons.”
Andrew Siemion, Director of Berkeley Research Center, agrees with the conclusion of the new study, that FRBs are probably happening all the time. He also thinks determining the rate of FRBs could help to unravel celestial mysteries.
“For example, if we hypothesise that a particular phenomena is due to, say, the merger of two stellar mass black holes, but discover that the rate of the phenomena is much less or much greater than the expected rate of mergers, we know either mergers are not responsible or our rate estimate of their occurrence is wrong,” said Siemion, who wasn’t involved in the new study, in an interview with Gizmodo. “Indeed we have known for some time that FRBs are fairly common... and the fact that we detect them so rarely testifies to how difficult they are to observe and how much real estate we have to cover with our telescopes.”
But Emily Petroff, a postdoctoral researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), says it’s still an open question as to how many FRBs are going off and how often.
“This paper is taking one approach which is to hours of looking, no other FRB has been seen to emit repeat pulses so it may not be right to assume that they all behave like this special source. But in the absence of any additional information it’s a fair assumption to make for the purposes of this model.”
Petroff says that only a small fraction of FRBs may be like the FRB 121102 repeater, which if true, would bring the numbers estimated in this paper down significantly.
“This paper makes an interesting point about what the sort of maximum number of FRBs going off at any given time might be, but I think the main takeaway is that our knowledge of FRBs is too limited at the moment to know if these distributions might be correct,” said Petroff.
Clearly, what’s needed are more observations. And as Loeb points out, we’re already—or soon will be—in the possession of tools that are capable of findings more FRBs, including the recently deployed Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the soon-to-be-finished Square Kilometre Array (SKA). [The Astrophysical Journal Letters]make some estimates about the underlying population and then to see how many are visible. It makes a nice contribution to the overall body of work but I don’t think it answers any fundamental questions,” Petroff told Gizmodo. “Despite hours and
Verbaasde vader ziet gloeiend object door de lucht zoeven: “Het vloog te snel om het logisch te kunnen verklaren”
Verbaasde vader ziet gloeiend object door de lucht zoeven: “Het vloog te snel om het logisch te kunnen verklaren”
Verbaasde vader ziet gloeiend object door de lucht zoeven: “Het vloog te snel om het logisch te kunnen verklaren”
Een Britse man kon zijn ogen niet geloven toen hij ’s avonds op pad ging om een meeneemmaaltijd af te halen en een onverklaarbaar voorwerp door de lucht zag vliegen. De man haalde snel zijn smartphone tevoorschijn om het gloeiende licht te filmen en publiceerde de beelden op sociale media in een poging een verklaring te vinden. “Ik kan het gewoon niet verklaren en het was iets dat ik nog nooit eerder zag”, aldus de verbaasde vader.
Gary Lowe uit Dagenham in Oost-Londen zag naar eigen zeggen iets “dat hij nog nooit eerder had gezien” en beweert dat het mysterieuze voorwerp zonder geluid door de lucht zoefde. “Het was compleet onverklaarbaar”, vertelt de vader van drie. “Ik kan gewoon niet bedenken wat het zou kunnen zijn geweest. Ik veronderstel dat het dan om een ufo gaat.”
De 38-jarige man geeft zelf toe dat hij eigenlijk niet in ufo’s gelooft en zegt dat de meeste raadselachtige fenomenen op een rationele manier kunnen worden verklaard. “Maar dat voorwerp vloog te snel. Het gloeide beurtelings rood en wit, ik kan het gewoon niet verklaren.” Lowe deelde de video van de UFO op sociale media, in de hoop dat experts hem kunnen vertellen wat hij die avond zag.
Nadat Lowe het onverklaarbare tuig in de lucht had zien hangen, zette hij zijn auto onmiddellijk langs de kant, en hij was niet de enige. “Andere mensen moeten er ook getuige van zijn geweest”, beweert hij. “Er waren andere ooggetuigen in de buurt en het ding leek vlakbij te vliegen.”
Onverklaarbaar of gewoon een drone?
Hoewel er volgens de Brit nog een andere man uit een restaurant kwam gelopen om de ufo te bekijken, zijn andere mensen niet zo onder de indruk van het mysterieuze voorwerp. “Toen ik de video aan mijn vrouw toonde, was ze amper verbaasd”, zegt Lowe. “Net zoals enkele anderen denkt ze dat het gewoon een drone was.”
Die mening deelt Philip Mantle, de voormalige directer van de Britse UFO Research Organisation: “Het probleem is dat dergelijke video’s meestal door een smartphone worden gemaakt en dus van bedenkelijke kwaliteit zijn.” Mantle geeft toe dat het gloeiende licht “veel sneller naar beneden gaat dan een gewoon vliegtuig”, maar oppert dat het gewoon een drone was die “meer dan normaal werd verlicht door de zonsondergang”.
Gary Lowe is echter niet tevreden met die uitleg en wil verder graven om het mysterie te ontrafelen: “Ik weet niet wat het was, maar ik ben geen scepticus. Het is mogelijk dat het ding van een andere planeet kwam, ik weet het gewoon niet.” Hij hoopt nu dat online ufologen meer duidelijkheid kunnen scheppen.
A black and white film said to show an autopsy on a Roswell alien was released in 1995. It was later said to be a reconstruction of actual footage
WHAT’S THE STORY?
TOMORROW marks the 70th anniversary of the start of what is either the longest-running hoax in modern history or the biggest cover-up the world has even known.
It was on September 24, 1947, that US President Harry S Truman allegedly – there will be a lot of words like that in this profile – signed a special classified executive order to establish a committee of 12 experts to carry out a “top-secret research and development/intelligence operation” into the supposed crash of an alien spacecraft some 75 miles north-west of Roswell Army Air Field base in New Mexico. They were given the code name Majestic 12.
SPACECRAFT?
MORE like an unidentified flying object, really. Something certainly did crash north of Roswell in the summer of 1947, and at first it was clearly identified as a “flying disc” which had been recovered by Roswell base personnel.
A press release was even sent out from the base announcing its recovery, and local newspapers proudly reported that the “disc” had been impounded with the help of the local sheriff’s office.
Local people reported seeing plastic-like substances and wires lying at the site. The world’s most famous UFO incident and the whole saga of Area 51 – the designation of the “secret” land and air space around Roswell – was under way.
WHAT WAS IT REALLY?
IN post-war America, a spate of UFO sightings and especially flying saucers had led the populace to believe that invasion from space was imminent, this on top of the growing paranoia about the USSR and the Communist threat to the good ole US of A.
The Roswell UFO incident, as it became known, started in fairly simple terms. The version of events put out by the military authorities was that the “disc” was a weather balloon, but no-one was buying that, and quite rightly so because the authorities were already colluding in a massive cover-up. The material actually came from a huge balloon that was involved in a top-secret spying mission known as Project Mogul which used balloons equipped with microphones to listen out for Soviet atomic tests. Or so the US authorities maintain to this day.
Had the US Government simply announced the truth, Roswell would probably never have featured in films such as Independence Day or television’s Dark Skies and the X-Files, but they couldn’t tell the public about something that didn’t officially exist. It’s always the cover-up that gets you …
WAS THAT REALLY THE TRUTH?
IT took the US Government until the 1990s to admit it, but the Project Mogul explanation fits the facts. The alternative version is Majestic 12, in which the president’s dozen specialists took possession of seven to nine – depending on who you believe – crashed flying saucers and the alleged remains of up to 27 alien life forms
According to an alleged leaked memo, we even know the names of the Majestic 12. They included Sidney William Souers, a former director of central intelligence; James Vincent Forrestal, the Secretary of Defense; Jerome Clarke Hunsaker, chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; General Nathan Farragut Twining, Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force from 1953 until 1957; Dr Vannevar Bush, head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War; Detlev Bronk, internationally recognised as the developer of biophysics; Donald Howard Menzel, one of America’s greatest theoretical astronomers and astrophysicists; and General Hoyt Sanford Vandenberg, second chief of staff of the US Air Force after whom Vandenberg Air Force Base is named. None of the dozen has ever confirmed membership of Majestic 12, and let’s face it, would such men have been involved in the sort of experimentation that the “aliens” were supposed to have undergone?
SO WHY DID SO MANY PEOPLE TAKE IT SO SERIOUSLY?
THE ufologist community has been split by Majestic 12 for decades. The name only entered common usage after the allegations of a cover-up of the Roswell UFO incident emerged in the early 1980s.
Hey presto, up popped a series of “leaked” Majestic 12 documents including a memo allegedly written by Robert Cutler, assistant to President Dwight D Eisenhower, to the aforementioned General Twining, referencing Majestic 12.
More and more outlandish claims were made about Majestic 12 and allegations were made that the people who revealed the existence of the documents were involved in an elaborate hoax.
Documentaries have been produced that alternatively debunk or support the Majestic 12 theories, and one later claim was made that the whole story was an exercise in disinformation from the start, as the US Government wanted to conceal what was really going at time, namely experiments connected to the Cold War.
Both the FBI and the US Air Force have carried out lengthy inquiries and have concluded that the claims about Majestic 12 and Roswell were completely bogus. But then they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Researchers say that FRBs could help scientists unravel the origins of the universe
iStock
Ever since fast radio bursts (FRBs) were first discovered in 2001, they have posed a mystery to scientists, with questions surrounding how and where they occur. Astronomers have spotted a few dozen FRBs over the past few years and even estimated the possible origin location of the mysterious signals.
However, what causes these signals still remains a mystery. Scientists now estimate that the mysterious radio signals may be firing off every second, all across the universe.
Most FRB sources are only detected once, given that the powerful bursts last just milliseconds. One particular burst, FRB 121102, which was first detected in 2002, has since fired a further 34 bursts over the years since.
This has allowed astronomers to pinpoint the location of the FRBs, which was discovered coming from a galaxy three billion light years away.
Now, two astronomers at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have estimated that FRBs are emitted at a rapid rate.
"If we are right about such a high rate of FRBs happening at any given time, you can imagine the sky is filled with flashes like paparazzi taking photos of a celebrity," said Anastasia Fialkov of the CfA, who led the study. "Instead of the light we can see with our eyes, these flashes come in radio waves."
Although the cause of the mysterious signals still remains a mystery, the new study indicates that FRBs may be not be as rare as previously thought. "In the time it takes you to drink a cup of coffee, hundreds of FRBs may have gone off somewhere in the Universe," said Avi Loeb, co-author of the study. "If we can study even a fraction of those well enough, we should be able to unravel their origin."
Researchers say that FRBs could help scientists unravel the origins of the universe. "FRBs are like incredibly powerful flashlights that we think can penetrate this fog and be seen over vast distances," said Fialkov. "This could allow us to study the 'dawn' of the universe in a new way."
This artist's impression shows part of the cosmic web, a filamentary structure of galaxies that extends across the entire sky with the bright blue, point sources shown here are the signals from Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) that may accumulate in a radio exposure lasting for a few minutesM. Weiss/CfA
Cassini captured mysterious 'glitch' on Saturn's rings before death dive
Cassini captured mysterious 'glitch' on Saturn's rings before death dive
ARIS FOLLEY, AOL.COM
Cassini sent home one last batch of photos from Saturn before plunging to its death Friday and among them was an attempt to record a mysterious object embedded in the planet's rings, otherwise known as "Peggy."
Peggy lives along the edge of Saturn and is an anomaly from which researchers have been unable to unearth the source.
RELATED: Cassini crash lands on Saturn
Cassini sent home one last batch of photos from Saturn before plunging to its death Friday and among them was an attempt to record a mysterious object ...
Cassini captured mysterious 'glitch' on Saturn's rings before death dive. The bizarre disturbance was first noticed in 2013 by London researcher Carl Murray ...
Slideshow preview image
The bizarre disturbance was first noticed in 2013 by London researcher Carl Murray, who named it after his mother-in-law after making the discovery on her birthday. And its effects on dust particles and surrounding ice has been recorded ever since.
Murray believes Peggy is a moon forming within the planet's rings, though researchers have yet to receive a direct image of Peggy's form.
Based on the size of the disturbance, however, Peggy's mass is estimated to be quite large. Researchers speculate its current form is likely a large cloud of debris and that it's been quite active as it is predicted to have split into two several years ago.
“When Cassini came out of its ring plane orbit in early 2016, we went back to look where Peggy should be; and we found Peggy and we've been tracking it ever since,” Murray told BBC News earlier this year.
“But a few degrees behind we could also see another object, even fainter in the sense that it had an even smaller (disturbance) signature. And when we tracked back the paths of both objects, we realized that in early 2015 they would have met," Murray added. "So, probably, Peggy 'B', as we call it, came from a collision of the sort that causes Peggy to change its orbit, but rather than a simple encounter that deflected the orbit slightly, this was more serious.”
Now Murray and his team are using the data obtained by the NASA spacecraft before its plunge into Saturn. “I couldn’t find Peggy in the data though I’m still looking,” he told Gizmodo. “Peggy’s probably there, I just haven’t found exactly where yet.”
“I’m used to every day going to the computers when the images come down [to] just look for fun stuff, like Peggy!” Murray explained. “It’s going to take me awhile to get used not getting to see these images every day.”
Cassini legt vlak voor crash iets mysterieus vast in ringen van Saturnus. Dit object zorgt voor raadsels
Cassini legt vlak voor crash iets mysterieus vast in ringen van Saturnus. Dit object zorgt voor raadsels
De ruimtesonde Cassini heeft na 13 jaar zijn laatste gegevens verzonden. Afgelopen week beëindigde het ruimtetuig zijn missie naar Saturnus door op de planeet te storten.
Vlak voordat Cassini te pletter stortte probeerde de sonde een mysterieus object vast te leggen dat verscholen ligt in de ringen van de planeet. Het object wordt ook wel ‘Peggy’ genoemd.
Peggy bevindt zich aan de rand van Saturnus en onderzoekers zijn er nog niet in geslaagd om te bepalen wat het precies is.
Geen beelden
Het bizarre object werd in 2013 ontdekt door onderzoeker Carl Murray, die het vernoemde naar zijn schoonmoeder.
Murray denkt dat Peggy een maan-in-wording zou kunnen zijn, hoewel onderzoekers nog geen beelden van de vorm van het object hebben.
Geschat wordt dat Peggy een vrij grote massa heeft. Wetenschappers vermoeden dat het object enkele jaren geleden in tweeën is gebroken.
Tweede object
“Begin 2016 keken we naar de plek waar Peggy zou moeten zijn,” vertelde Murray eerder dit jaar aan BBC News. “We vonden Peggy en volgen het [object] sindsdien op de voet.”
In de buurt van Peggy troffen ze nog een tweede object aan, dat Peggy B is gedoopt.
Murray en zijn team gebruiken nu de data die het ruimteschip van de NASA heeft verzameld voordat het neerstortte op Saturnus.
Nog niet gevonden
“Ik kon Peggy niet vinden in de gegevens, maar ik ben nog steeds aan het zoeken,” vertelde hij aan Gizmodo.
“Peggy zit er waarschijnlijk tussen, ik heb het object alleen nog niet gevonden,” voegde hij toe.
Cassini is in 1997 gelanceerd en deed er zeven jaar over om bij Saturnus te komen. De ruimtesonde ontdekte onder andere oceanen op Enceladus en zeeën van vloeibaar methaan op Titan.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
