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 NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 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...
30-11-2017
DE AARDE GAAT LANGZAMER DRAAIEN EN DE MAAN KRIJGT DE SCHULD
DE AARDE GAAT LANGZAMER DRAAIEN EN DE MAAN KRIJGT DE SCHULD
Wetenschappers slaan alarm omdat ze verwachten dat de aarde in 2018 te maken zal krijgen met zeer zware aardbevingen.
Dit zou dan komen omdat de aarde langzamer gaat draaien en als reden daarvoor wijst men naar de maan.
We leven in spannende tijden, waar steeds meer aanwijzingen boven water komen dat er zich wel degelijk een soort mini zonnestelsel in de buurt van onze zon bevindt, ondanks alle ontkenningen van NASA.
Wij zijn ook kort van geheugen, want iedereen is vergeten dat er de vorige eeuw meerdere gerespecteerde wetenschappers waren die ervan overtuigd waren dat de planeet Nibiru met haar metgezellen bestond en dat deze een vreemde ellipstische baan door ons zonnestelsel aflegt.
Twee wetenschappers die er als het ware uitspringen zijn de astronomen Muñoz Ferrada en Dr. Robert Harrington.
Bij ons in de Westerse wereld hebben waarschijnlijk maar weinig mensen gehoord van Carlos Muñoz Ferrada.
Hij was een Chileense astronoom die in 2001 op 92-jarige leeftijd is overleden en die misschien wel de belangrijkste aanwijzing ooit heeft gegeven voor het bestaan van de planeet Nibiru, of Hercolubus zoals deze soms ook wordt genoemd.
Ruim 43 jaar voordat de infrarode Iris telescoop van NASA in 1983 een onbekende planeet had ontdekt volgens een artikel in de Washington Post, sprak Ferrada hier al over. Dat is zefs ruim 36 jaar voordat in 1976 het beroemde boek van Zecharia Sitchin “De Twaalfde Planeet” verscheen.
Muñoz Ferrada werd beroemd in Chili toen hij op 19 januari 1939 een zware aardbeving voorspelde in zijn land voor 24 januari dat jaar. Op het moment dat hij de lezing gaf, geloofde geen mens in het publiek hem, maar toen op 24 januari 1939 Chili inderdaad werd getroffen door een zeer zware aardbeving die aan tienduizenden mensen het leven kostte, was het een ander verhaal.
De tweede wetenschapper die eruit springt is Dr. Robert Harrington, in de jaren tachtig en begin jaren negentig hoofdastronoom van de US Naval Observatory. Ook deze astronoom was ervan overtuigd dat er een onbekende planeet in ons zonnestelsel moest zijn, omdat dit de enige logische verklaring was voor de verstoringen van omloopbanen van planeten in de buitenste regionen van ons zonnestelsel.
Dr. Harrington stierf plotseling onder mysterieuze omstandigheden, net toen hij op punt stond om in Nieuw Zeeland opzienbarende ontdekkingen bekend te maken in 1993.
In 1991 vertrok Harrington voor NASA met een telescoop naar Nieuw Zeeland om van daaruit de naderende planeet Nibiru vast te leggen. Hij verbleef daar in totaal bijna twee jaar en alles wat hij aan beeldmateriaal produceerde werd doorgestuurd naar Washington. Volgens mensen die hem kenden stond Harrington in januari 1993 op het punt wereldkundig te maken wat hij had ontdekt.
Echter, hoewel Harrington tot dan toe niets gemankeerd had, werd bij hem een zeldzame vorm van slokdarmkanker geconstateerd en was hij vreemd genoeg binnen enkele dagen dood. Wat zijn de kansen dat een gezonde man die in Nieuw Zeeland fysiek vrij zwaar werk verrichtte, binnen enkele dagen overlijdt aan kanker? De vrouw van Harrington, Betty, is er heilig van overtuigd dat haar man werd vermoord. Direct na de dood van Harrington werd de telescoop snel weggehaald of zoals een collega het omschreef, "almost before he was cold". Vanaf dat moment was het eigenlijk voorgoed over met de berichtgeving rond de planeet Nibiru, althans wat de officiële kanalen betreft.
In de volgende video die is opgenomen in 1990 zie je Dr. Harrington in gesprek met de bekende onderzoeker en auteur Zecharia Sitchin.
De afgelopen weken verschenen er uitgebreide berichten in de media over het feit dat de aarde langzamer is gaan draaien en dat dit betekent dat we volgend jaar, 2018, zware en vernietigende aardbevingen kunnen verwachten.
In de hieronder geplaatste video wordt gesteld dat dit het vierde jaar op rij is, waarbij de aarde minder snel om haar as draait. Het zijn minieme verschillen die je als zodanig niet voelt en de verklaring is dan dat dit gebeurt door de aantrekkingskracht van de maan.
Natuurlijk wordt de maan genoemd, omdat dit lekker vertrouwd klinkt, want wanneer je zegt dat dit komt door een aantal vreemde planeten binnen ons zonnestelsel, dan breekt de paniek uit.
Als je verder bedenkt dat het aantal aardbevingen dit jaar al zal uitkomen op het hoogste aantal ooit in de bekende geschiedenis en wetenschappers weten nu al dat er in 2018 veel vooral zware aardbevingen zullen plaatsvinden, dan is duidelijk dat de planeet Nibiru snel naderbij komt.
Als je naar bovenstaande cijfers kijkt van aardbevingen sinds 1997 kijkt en je ziet dat wij ons nu in een bloedrode periode bevinden en ze beginnen nu al met waarschuwen voor aardbevingen volgend jaar, dan is er iets meer aan de hand dan de aantrekkingskracht van de maan. In twintig jaar tijd van 16.469 aardbevingen per jaar naar 112.201 in 2016 en dit jaar naar alle waarschijnlijkheid nog hoger.
Supervulkanen, waarvan de meeste niet eens wisten dat ze bestonden, komen allemaal plotseling tot leven:
Niet alleen in de Verenigde Staten (Yellowstone), maar ook in Italië (bijna Napels) en Noord Korea zijn de afgelopen tijd supervulkanen tot veler verrassing actief geworden. Wetenschappers van het gerenommeerde Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) van de NASA hebben nu nieuw bewijs gevonden dat het afbreken van stukken ijs van Antarctica niet wordt veroorzaakt door klimaatopwarming door CO2, maar door een enorme geothermische hittebron, die bijna de omvang heeft van de Yellowstone supervulkaan, en die het ijs van binnenuit smelt. Daarmee zijn alle tientallen miljarden euro’s kostende maatregelen om in Nederland de CO2-uitstoot terug te dringen nog zinlozer dan ze al waren.
De geothermische hittebron is een ‘mantelpluim’, een hete ‘pilaar’ van onderaardse gesmolten rotsen die door de aardmantel heen tot pal onder het oppervlakte omhoog steekt. De mantelpluim zelf werd al eerder ontdekt en bevindt zich in Mary Byrd Land. Dat deze waarschijnlijk verantwoordelijk is voor het ‘ademeffect’ op delen van Antarctica, en het afbreken van grote stukken ijs –zowel nu als 11.000 jaar geleden-, is echter nieuw.
Dr. Harrington, Sitchin en Muñoz wisten dat er een onbekende planeet bestond en zij hebben hun uiterste best gedaan om ons te waarschuwen. Helaas is de mensheid nogal geneigd de fabeltjes van de elite te geloven die ons vertellen dat we braaf moeten doorwerken, terwijl zij de laatste hand leggen aan hun riante schuilkelders in veilige gebieden.
While it used to be politics and religion, more and more people now agree that two things you shouldn’t bring up at family gatherings are science and religion. That’s because science and religion don’t seem to agree on too many things. Good news for those wondering what they’ll be talking about at Christmas parties … there’s a new discovery that both science and religion fans can agree on. Researchers studying the limestone cave that is the purported tomb of Jesus at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem have determined that it dates back much further than once thought and supports the story of its original enshrinement by the Romans. Discuss amongst yourselves.
The research results were released this week by National Geographic. The tomb, said by believers to be where the Romans laid the body after crucifixion, was covered with a marble shield since at least 1555 CE and was only opened in October of 2016. One of the things found was a mysterious older slab. Parts of it and the mortar used to hold it in place were analyzed and dated, and the results were surprising.
Some of the mortar samples taken from the south wall of the cave date to around 335 CE. That coincides with the stories that Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, ordered a search for the tomb. It was allegedly underneath a 200-year-old Roman temple which was destroyed, revealing a limestone cave that could be the tomb. This new evidence indicates that the slab was used to seal the tomb and the first Edicule or shrine was built over it. That shrine was damaged by fire and earthquakes and eventually destroyed in 1009 by the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. Other mortar samples found date to the reconstruction shortly after this.
Now it’s time for the arguments. Does this new mortar evidence cement the idea that this is the actual tomb of Jesus? Not really. It does show that the location was considered to be the tomb in the fourth century and the belief was strong enough to cover it with a temple, not to mention start many battles.
While the cave will continue to be studied, the real issue today is the condition of the Edicule. It was reconstructed in 1808-1810 after being destroyed by fire and it’s in poor condition due to both age and the amount of activity around it. It sounds like the solution is hidden inside this new discovery … mortar.
What part of that sounds good? Throw in “US military,” and “testing on soldiers” and you have the plot of a dystopian movie. Unfortunately, you also have news this week that this is real and tests have already begun. Does the fact that it’s purported purpose is to eventually treat mental disorders that no other therapies can help make you feel any better?
While this type of brain implant has been discussed for years, previous attempts to alter moods with implanted computer chips have failed. That’s not the case with these latest experiments, according to a new report in the journal Nature on a presentation made by researchers last week at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in Washington DC. Two different projects are being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the purpose of providing new and more effective treatment for treating soldiers and veterans with severe depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Neuroscientist Edward Chang from the University of California, San Francisco, heads the team that is mapping the brain activities caused by moods and mood changes in six epileptics. The map will allow them to create a chip with an algorithm that recognizes oncoming mood shifts and sends signals to control them. Chang claims they’ve already tested this brain stimulation on humans.
The second team from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston is mapping the brain activity related to behaviors in people with multiple mental disorders. Their goal is to use the maps to develop algorithms to recognize problem behaviors (like distraction) caused by the illnesses and deliver brain stimulations to direct the person to more appropriate behaviors. They are currently looking for test subjects.
The researchers feel that this new type of mood and behavior altering via chip implants will work where others have failed because the mapping will allow them to personalize and pinpoint the electrical stimulations. On the downside, they still need a way to precisely measure the brain impulses so they don’t over-stimulate the person into states of extreme happiness or worse mental illness.
This all sounds wonderful and promising … until you remember that this is a government project intended to be used on soldiers. What else will this “window into the brain” allow the brain stimulators to control or modify? What else will be seen through this brain-mapping window? It’s not monitoring thoughts … yet. It’s not changing behaviors not linked to mental disorders … yet. It’s not collecting data to be sold to businesses, insurance companies, financial institutions, schools and other organizations … yet.
Are you ready to have one of these chips implanted in your brain? If you’re in the military, will you be given a choice? If you’re a civilian and have a mental disorder and other treatments have failed, will you be given a choice?
There are rumors that we went to the moon but we had help, besides it seems the landings filmed by Stanley Kubrick were staged to cover what they really encountered on the moon: reptilians, bases, buildings, machines for mineral exploration and much more.
Lunar Anomaly.
Now, once again, an out of the place lunar anomaly has been discovered by Streetcap1 in one of NASA’s Unmanned Lunar Orbiter photographs taken last year around December.
According to Streetcap1 the shadow seems to indicate right angles and parallel lines which could be an indication that the anomaly is some sort of building. The scale is 0.56 meters/pixel. So it's huge.
So if the landings were staged to cover-up what they really encountered on the moon then could it be possible that the discovery of the lunar anomaly is such a building, a construction built by an intelligent alien race in the past?
Obviously, it cannot be proven whether the lunar anomaly is a building or not but we may wonder whether the moon landings indeed were staged if you listen to the interview that Project Camelot had with Fred, a 90 year old former technical inspector in Aviation working for an Airline back in the 60's. During the interview Fred recalls how he stumbled on a hangar in Michigan that appeared to be at least one staging hangar for the faked part of the Apollo Moon Landings, see second video.
If I heard a young person say this, my first thought would be that they’re on the football team and the “Science of Daydreaming” classes were full. However, if the young person showed an acceptance letter from Akdeniz University in Turkey, they’re telling the truth and their parents are in for a big surprise.
Ufology? Only if there’s no term papers.
Erhan Kolbaşı told the Doğan News Agency that he offering the class because he wants students to be prepared for contact with extraterrestrials, including knowing the ins and outs of alien politics and galactic diplomacy. It’s nice that he’s preparing these young minds for diplomacy rather than warfare, even though he sees this contact leading to the “biggest change seen in the history of the world.”
What qualifies Erhan Kolbaşı to teach this program? He’s the deputy chair of the Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Centerin Istanbul, which was founded by ufologist Haktan Akdoğan, who is also the founder of the Istanbul UFO Museum and will help provide background material for the courses. According to the Doğan News Agency, the course is supposed to train students on the methodology and potential sources for finding UFO and ET information.
“We believe representatives from the world and extraterrestrial civilizations will soon be making official contact with each other. We think they will be in an open and mass contact.”
Kolbaşı says he expects this “open and mass contact” to occur “within 10 or 15 years,” which appears to be a strange prediction since he and Akdoğan both seem to concur that alien contact has already occurred numerous times and will be providing the ufology students with information on cover-ups and secret files.
Those cover-ups include their beliefs that aliens and crashed UFOs have provided humans with advanced technologies (at least at the time they were found) like fiber optic cables, microchips, night vision glasses and bullet-proof clothing. Details on this information alone would be worth the price of tuition (no tuition costs were given but Akdeniz University is a major college with 31,000 students, so it’s probably comparable to major public colleges in the U.S.) but Kolbaşı also hints that he may not be able to spill all of the secret beans because of MJ-12 or Majestic 12, the alleged secret committee formed by President Harry Truman in 1947 to investigate and collect data on aliens and UFOs, and later to suppress any information on the data.
Do you think this will be on the test?
Would you take a class like this if it were offered at one of your local colleges? Even if you weren’t on a football scholarship? Does that guy sitting next to you look like Tom DeLonge? Would you be concerned that the person following you back to the dorm wasn’t a creepy freshman but an MJ-12 agent or a Man in Black?
Just to be on the safe side, you may want to purposely fail the class.
If you still think all the warnings about the impending robot and artificial intelligence uprising are just paranoia, you’re not paying enough attention. Robots and machine learning networks have been steadily creeping into our lives for years. From manufacturing to self-checkout kiosks at grocery stores to self-driving taxis or long-haul trucks, robots are beginning to perform many tasks that were once the responsibility of humans. That’s not all though – robots and AI are also researching case law for legal firms, analyzing medical data in hospitals, and winning poker tournaments. What’s next?
We all know what’s next.
According to recent developments, they’ll be invading our bedrooms next, that’s what. And no, not just for that (although according to most reports, they’re pretty good at it). Robots and artificial intelligence are now beginning to revolutionize the most important activity we engage in while in bed: sleeping. We spend nearly a third of our lives asleep, yet millions of individuals worldwide suffer from various sleep disorders. Why not let a cold, emotionless robot crawl in bed next to soothe you to sleep with its simulated breathing? What could go wrong?
With a few added features, Somnox could be a one-stop bedroom bot.
A Netherlands-based robotics laboratory has released what they’re calling the “world’s first sleep robot,” called Somnox. Somnox is essentially a bean-shaped stuffed animal with an internal robotic skeleton wrapped in mattress foam that can expand and contract similar to the way living things do as they breathe. The shape of the robot encourages users to spoon and cuddle the faceless monstrosity, which then ‘breathes’ at a soothing rhythm and speed to help “soothe body and mind, helping you feel more relaxed and energized.” The robot can also play a variety of sounds and music, and has a companion mobile app for data collection and control of sleep-inducing audio or music.
Speaking of which, another laboratory has used artificial intelligence to compose the world’s most effective lullaby. Artificial intelligence firm Jukedeck have developed a neural network capable of analyzing human-created lullabies in order to find the most effective aspects of each. Ed Newton-Rex, the founder and CEO of Jukedeck, says AI can detect the somewhat ‘hidden’ patterns revealed by the types of large-scale musical data analyses of which AI is capable:
An artificial neural network is essentially a representation of the neurons and synapses in the human brain – and, like the brain, if you show one of these networks lots of complex data, it does a great job of finding hidden patterns in that data. We showed our networks a large body of sheet music, and, through training, it reached the point where it could take a short sequence of notes as input and predict which notes were likely to follow.
Using this analysis, Jukedeck and partner AXA PPP healthcare of Kent, England have created an AI lullaby claimed to be one of the most effective lullabies for inducing sleep:
Sure, it’s soothing I guess, but I can’t help but feeling like the overall impression is a bit sterile; it sounds like what you would expect a computer generated melody to sound like. Computers are getting close to being able to produce compelling and moving art, but they’re not quite there yet. It’s only a matter of time, though, before human-generated art has to compete alongside AI-generated art which can take full advantage of human emotional responses much better than humans can.
Would the addition of a cute face help users get over the creep factor of hugging a robot while you sleep?
Will individuals seeking a better night’s sleep take to cuddling robots and listening to AI music? If so, why not build these features into a human-shaped robot? Why not add a personality simulator and artificial intelligence to help it learn your sleep habits better? See where this is going? Somnox might be a cute little cuddle machine, but it’s still a machine. Who knows what kind of doors the adoption of such a robot could open? I know one thing: I’m sewing googly eyes on mine. His name will be Chopstick.
Bacteria express a green fluorescent protein that’s produced from DNA instructions with unnatural chemical “letters” added. (Scripps Research Institute Photo / Bill Klosses)
Researchers have reached a new milestone in their effort to expand the genetic alphabet of life by designing a strain of E. coli bacteria that creates proteins unlike anything cells can produce naturally.
The technique, detailed in a paper published today in the journal Nature, could lead to the production of totally new types of protein-based medicines, plastics and biofuels.
It could also stretch the definition of natural vs. artificial life.
“I would not call this a new lifeform — but it’s the closest thing anyone has ever made,” study leader Floyd Romesberg, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute, said in a news release. “This is the first time ever a cell has translated a protein using something other than G, C, A or T.”
Those four letters stand for guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, chemicals that serve as the alphabet for the coded instructions in DNA molecules. The instructions are used to produce all the amino acids and proteins that cells require for life’s processes.
Three years ago, Romesberg and his colleagues successfully inserted two other chemicals, dubbed X and Y, into DNA molecules. Since then, the researchers have developed ways for bacteria to store the augmented DNA and pass it along as they reproduced.
In their newly published paper, the team reports that the six-letter DNA coding could be transcribed into RNA molecules, and then translated into amino acids and proteins that don’t occur naturally.
The technique was used to customize a set of genetic instructions for manufacturing a variant of green fluorescent protein, or GFP, that incorporated unnatural amino acids. When E. coli bacteria were genetically engineered to include those instructions, the organisms produced the protein, which glowed bright green under ultraviolet light. That signaled that the bacteria could make use of the “alien” DNA.
“This was the smallest possible change we could make to the way life works — but it is the first ever,” Romesberg said.
The study also demonstrated that life’s molecular machinery could make use of linkages other than the hydrogen bonds that bind G, C, A and T. The X and Y bases were designed to avoid hydrogen bonds, to make sure they didn’t get mixed up with the other molecular letters.
That has implications in the search for “weird life” beyond the earthly variety we all know and love.
“It’s very hard to ask questions about the origins of life. It’s hard to ask questions about why we are the way we are, why we are built the way we are, because we have nothing out there to compare ourselves to,” Romesberg said. “We’ve now given the field a comparison. It’s a small step, but it’s the first successful step.”
He and his colleagues emphasized that the semi-synthetic organisms couldn’t live or reproduce outside the lab, because the chemicals required for producing the X and Y bases had to be provided externally.
Romesberg is among the founders of a biotech venture called Synthorx, which is developing protein therapeutics that make use of X and Y.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has released a virtual reality tour of the City of Wisdom, their vision of humanity's first settlement on Mars. The UAE has announced they intend to establish the first colony on the red planet by 2117.
You’ve reached Mars, and the first stop on your tour of the Red Planet is a small hangar, done up in chrome and brown and rust. Here, you are welcomed by a holographic emissary before departing in your hovering spherical craft: “On behalf of the United Government of Mars, I would like to welcome you to your second home.”
Outside, massive, insectile robot excavators pound away at the dusty red-brown soil to form roads and dig the foundations of new buildings. In no time, a red dome appears on the horizon: the City of Wisdom, humanity’s first settlement on Mars. Complete with laboratories, a University, green spaces, flowing architecture, and 600,000 permanent residents, this is Mars 2117 — the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) vision for the future of our nearest planetary neighbor — and you can explore it yourself in full virtual reality.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, announced earlier this year that the Emirates would lead an effort to establish the first international settlement on Mars by 2117. The country plans to work with scientists from around the globe to develop technology that makes traveling to and living on Mars possible. In September, the Dubai Media Office announced their plan to build a simulated Mars colony in the Emirati desert to develop the food, energy, and water systems that could support future settlers of the Red Planet.
SpaceX's Big Mars Rocket Could Help Chase Down Interstellar Asteroid
SpaceX's Big Mars Rocket Could Help Chase Down Interstellar Asteroid
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Artist's illustration of 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar asteroid.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO
There may be yet another future use for SpaceX's huge Mars-colonization rocket.
That rocket, called the BFR, could launch a probe toward 'Oumuamua, the interstellar asteroid that zoomed past Earth last month, a new study suggests.
The 1,300-foot-long (400 meters) 'Oumuamua is currently speeding away from us at about 58,160 mph (93,600 km/h, or 26 km/s). That's far faster than any spacecraft has ever traveled upon escaping Earth (though some have gone faster as they approached big bodies, such as the sun). But a mission employing the in-development BFR, with speed-boosting flybys of Jupiter and the sun, could theoretically chase 'Oumuamua down, the study said. ['Oumuamua: An Interstellar Visitor Explained in Photos]
This potential architecture is based on concepts drawn up by researchers at the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), both of which are in Pasadena, California, the study's authors noted.
"The KISS Interstellar Medium study computed that a hyperbolic excess velocity of 70 km/s was possible via this technique, a value which achieves an intercept at about 85 AU in 2039 for a 2025 launch," the authors wrote in the study, one version of which was published on the site Centauri Dreams. (AU is short for "astronomical unit," the distance from Earth to the sun, which is about 93 million miles, or 150 million km. And "hyperbolic excess velocity" just refers to the spacecraft's speed.)
"More-modest figures can still fulfill the mission, such as 40 km/s with an intercept at 155 AU in 2051," the authors added. "With the high approach speed, a hyper-velocity impactor to produce a gas 'puff' to sample with a mass spectrometer could be the serious option to get in-situ data."
Such a mission would really round out the reusable BFR's portfolio. SpaceX already envisions using the giant rocket — along with its paired spaceship — for all manner of tasks, including launching satellites, carrying people on superfast point-to-point journeys around the globe and cleaning up space junk.
But the BFR is not the only option for an 'Oumuamua mission, the study authors wrote. Tiny, laser-propelled sail craft, like the ones the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot project aims to launch to other star systems, could do the job as well. (But a 2025 launch date for a sail-craft swarm is unrealistic; the Starshot team has estimated the probes may be ready for prime time in 20 years or so if everything goes well.)
"An important result of our analysis is that the value of a laser-beaming infrastructure from the Breakthrough Initiatives' Project Starshot would be the flexibility to react quickly to future unexpected events, such as sending a swarm of probes to the next object like 1I/'Oumuamua," the new study said. (The "1I" in front of 'Oumuamua references the object's official scientific designation: 1I/2017 U1.)
"With such an infrastructure in place today, intercept missions could have reached 1I/'Oumuamua within a year," they added.
Even if an 'Oumuamua mission never comes to pass, astronomers could still get an up-close look at a visitor from another solar system in the not-too-distant future: Such interstellar interlopers may zoom through the inner solar system as often as every year or so, scientists have said. (But spotting them appears to be a tall order, given that 'Oumuamua is the first one we've ever identified.)
The new study was conducted by researchers with Project Lyra, which aims to assess the feasibility of a mission to rendezvous with or fly by 'Oumuamua. You can read the short version of the study on Centauri Dreams or the more detailed one on the online preprint site arXiv.org.
Little Green Men? Pulsars Presented a Mystery 50 Years Ago
Little Green Men? Pulsars Presented a Mystery 50 Years Ago
By Calla Cofield, Space.com Senior Writer
Fifty years ago this month, a small group of astronomers made a revolutionary cosmic discovery — explaining a phenomenon that they initially thought might come from an intelligent alien civilization.
In November 1967, Jocelyn Bell (now Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell), a graduate student at Cambridge University in England, made what turned out to be the first detection of a pulsar — an incredibly dense ball of material formed when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses in on itself. In the time since the discovery of pulsars, the objects have provided insight about the life cycle of stars and extreme states of matter, and provided evidence that supports Albert Einstein's theory of gravity. There are currently efforts underway to use pulsars to detect gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of the universe, and another to use pulsars as part of a space-based navigation system.
Pulsars spin rapidly, while simultaneously radiating opposing beams of radio waves out into space. The setup is similar to a lighthouse that spins around one up-and-down axis and radiates two beams of light from a second axis. To ships on the water, the steady beams looks like a light pulsing on and off. The same is true for pulsars; if one of the beams happens to sweep across the Earth, it appears to astronomers as though the object is blinking or pulsing. [What Are Pulsars?]
Bell Burnell was studying objects using a radio telescope she helped build at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, outside Cambridge, under the supervision of her advisor, Antony Hewish, who designed the instrument. The telescope was intended to help study the radio cosmos using a technique called interplanetary scintillation. Hewish intended to use this method on objects called quasars, or incredibly bright centers of massive galaxies, illuminated by material swirling around monster black holes. Quasars vary in brightness, and Hewish thought the interplanetary scintillation technique was appropriate for identifying those changes.
"We were looking far beyond [what could be seen with] optical telescopes," Hewish told the BBC of the radio astronomy he and his colleagues were doing then. "You felt very privileged actually. It was like opening a new window onto the universe, and you were the first people to have a look out through and see what was there."
Most known neutron stars are observed as pulsars, emitting narrow, sweeping beams of radiation. They squeeze up to two solar masses into a city-size volume, crushing matter to the highest possible stable densities.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Bell Burnell was in charge of operating the telescope and analyzing the data, according to an article she wrote for Cosmic Search Magazine in the 1970s. Using this technique, Bell Burnell spotted an object that appeared to be flickering every 1.3 seconds; this pattern repeated for days on end. The object didn't match the profile of a quasar. The signal conflicted with the generally chaotic nature of most cosmic phenomenon, the researchers would later explain. In addition, the light was of a very specific radio frequency, whereas most natural sources typically radiate across a wider range.
For those reasons, Bell Burnell, Hewish and some other members of the astronomy department had to acknowledge that they might have found an artificially created signal — something emitted by an intelligence species. Burnell even labeled the first pulsar LGM1, which stood for "little green men 1."
A second discovery
Bell Burnell would later report that Hewitt called a meeting without her, in which he discussed with other members of the department how they should handle presenting their results to the world. While their fellow scientists might practice restraint and skepticism, it was likely that the possible detection of an intelligent alien civilization could create chaos among the public, the scientists said. The press would very likely blow the story out of proportion and descend on the Cambridge researchers. According to Hewitt, one person even suggested (perhaps only partly joking) that they burn their data and forget the whole thing.
Years later, Burnell wrote that she was rather annoyed at the appearance of the strange signal for another reason. As a graduate student, she was trying to get her thesis work done before her funding ran out, but work on the pulsar was taking away from her primary pursuit.
"Here I trying to get a Ph.D. out of a new technique, and some silly lot of little green men had to choose my aerial and my frequency to communicate with us," she wrote in the article for Cosmic Search Magazine.
Pulsars are fast-spinning and highly magnetized stars. See how they work here.
Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics artist
But then, Bell Burnell resolved the problem. She went back through some of the data from the radio array and found what looked like a similar, regularly repeating signal, this one coming from an entirely different part of the galaxy. That second signal indicated that this was a family of objects, rather than a single civilization trying to make contact.
"It finally scotched the little green men hypothesis," Bell Burnell said in the a BBC documentary filmed in 2010. "Because it's highly unlikely there's two lots of little green men, on opposite sides of the universe, both deciding to signal to a rather inconspicuous planet, Earth, at the same time, using a daft technique and a rather commonplace frequency."
"It had to be some new kind of star, not seen before," she said. "And that then cleared the way for us publishing, going public."
In 1974, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Hewish, along with radio astronomer Martin Ryle, "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture-synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars." The omission of Bell Burnell's name as a contributor to the pulsar discovery has stirred controversy among scientists and members of the public, though Bell Burnell has not publicly contested the Nobel committee's decision.
Experts reveal the best-kept secret of the mysterious Easter Island Civilization
Experts reveal the best-kept secret of the mysterious Easter Island Civilization
A team of anthropologists came to the conclusion that the inhabitants of the remote Easter Island, the Rapanui, had no contact with the outside world until the arrival of the Europeans on the island in 1722.
The results of the study were published in the specialized journal Current Biology.
The study also points out that if there were cultural contacts between the Rapanui and the South American native peoples, “there is no trace of them” in their genes.
During the experiment, the researchers analyzed the DNA sequences extracted from the remains that are conserved of five individuals, three of which date from the XIV-XV centuries and the other two from people born between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Each bone fragment provided the researchers with about 200 milligrams of genetic material.
According to the person in charge of the study, Lars Fehren-Schmitz, of the University of California in Santa Cruz (USA), the scientists were “really surprised” by this discovery.
“Our information suggests that the American Indian heritage present today in the people of Easter Island was not present on the island before contact with Europeans and therefore may be due to more recent events in history,” said professor Fehren-Schmitz.
He stressed that “we were convinced that we would find direct evidence of a pre-European contact with South America, but we did not”.
The famous Moai Statues.
Image Credit: Shutterstock.
According to Fehren-Schmitz, this discovery sheds light on the evolution and human genetic diversity.
However, scientists could not determine when the first contact that altered the genome of modern Pascuenses occurred.
At present, the DNA of the inhabitants of the island shows between 6% and 8% of genetic material coming from indigenous people.
For this reason, the researcher stressed that his team plans to continue studying in this direction to determine more precisely how and when this gene entry from the continent occurred and from where it originated.
“The dynamics of the population of these regions is fascinating, we need to study the ancient populations of other islands, if they exist,” he said.
He also added that slavery, whaling and mass deportations are activities that could explain this genetic fingerprint.
It is estimated that the Rapanui arrived on Easter Island – located more than 2,000 kilometers from the nearest inhabited island – in the second century of our era.
Some anthropologists believe that this civilization – the creator of the massive Moai statues, which are the main tourist attraction on the island – is more related to pre-Columbian peoples than to inhabitants of other islands in the region.
Image Credit: Shutterstock
More than 900 moai statues sculpted by the ancient rapa Nui are distributed throughout the island.
Most of them were carved from the Rano Raraku volcanic cone, where more than 400 moai remain in different phases of construction.
The historical data of the entire development of the various construction techniques was developed on the island between 700 AD and 1600 AD.
Everything indicates that the quarry was suddenly abandoned and half-carved statues were left in the rock.
Astronomers used an instrument called MUSE to conduct the deepest-ever spectroscopic survey. The result was a bonanza of new knowledge.
Here’s the Hubble Ultra Deep Field region, as observed with the MUSE instrument installed at the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in northern Chile. MUSE data provide a rainbow-like spectrum for each pixel in this picture. Image via ESO/ MUSE HUDF collaboration.
Sometimes, astronomy is about surveying widely to get the big picture. And sometimes it’s about looking more and more deeply. First released in 2004, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is clearly about going deep. It’s a composite image of a tiny region of space, located in the direction of the southern constellation Fornax, made from Hubble Space Telescope data gathered over several months. There are an estimated 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which exist as far back in time as 13 billion years ago (between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang). Being able to see galaxies so near the beginning of our universe has been a fantastic tool for understanding how the universe has evolved. And now – thanks to an instrument called MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer), astronomers have been able to eke out yet more information – a veritable bonanza of information – from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Their work is being published today (November 29, 2017) in a series of 10 papers in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
MUSE does more than just see the galaxies. It also splits their light into its component colors, using a technique that astronomers call spectroscopy. In the image above, a team of astronomers led by Roland Bacon of the Centre de recherche astrophysique de Lyon, France, used MUSE to obtain a rainbow-like spectrum for each pixel in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
… the deepest spectroscopic observations ever made.
They obtained spectra for 1,600 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. That’s 10 times as many galaxies as has been painstakingly obtained in this field over the last decade by ground-based telescopes. Roland Bacon said:
MUSE can do something that Hubble can’t — it splits up the light from every point in the image into its component colours to create a spectrum. This allows us to measure the distance, colors and other properties of all the galaxies we can see — including some that are invisible to Hubble itself.
Jarle Brinchmann, lead author of one of the papers describing results from this survey, from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences at CAUP in Porto, Portugal, commented:
MUSE has the unique ability to extract information about some of the earliest galaxies in the universe — even in a part of the sky that is already very well studied. We learn things about these galaxies that is only possible with spectroscopy, such as chemical content and internal motions — not galaxy by galaxy but all at once for all the galaxies!
Among other results, MUSE revealed 72 galaxies never seen before in this very tiny area of the sky. These galaxies wouldn’t have been obvious to Hubble. They’re members of a perplexing group of galaxies known as Lyman-alpha emitters. They shine only in Lyman-alpha light (produced when electrons in hydrogen atoms drop from the second-lowest to the lowest energy level). These objects become noticeable in MUSE data because MUSE disperses the light into its component colors. Meanwhile, in direct images such as those from the Hubble Space Telescope, these galaxies remain invisible. Why do these galaxies shine in this peculiar way? Astronomers don’t fully know.
The work also revealed luminous hydrogen halos around galaxies in the early universe. The astronomers said this discovery offers:
… a new and promising way to study how material flows in and out of early galaxies.
Other potential applications of this dataset are explored in the series of papers, including a study of the role of faint galaxies during cosmic reionization (starting just 380,000 years after the Big Bang), galaxy merger rates when the universe was young, galactic winds, star formation and the mapping the motions of stars in the early universe.
Roland Bacon pointed out that the data for all of this work were obtained prior to an upgrade to MUSE’s Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF). He said:
The activation of the AOF after a decade of intensive work by ESO’s astronomers and engineers promises yet more revolutionary data in the future.
From MUSE’s website: “Looking like a machine straight out of the movie The Matrix, with its Medusa-like hoses and connections, MUSE is the latest of the 2nd-generation instruments to be installed on Yepun (UT4), the fourth Unit Telescope of the Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory.”
Bottom line: Astronomers used an instrument called MUSE to peer toward the area of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and to conduct the deepest-ever spectroscopic survey. The result? A bonanza of new knowledge!
Le SETI se demande si l'astéroïde 'Oumuamua ne serait pas un appareil extra-terrestre
Le SETI se demande si l'astéroïde 'Oumuamua ne serait pas un appareil extra-terrestre
L’institut scientifique SETI, qui recherche l’existence de formes de vie extra-terrestres, a tourné ses téléscopes vers ‘Oumuamua, l’étrange astéroïde de forme allongée venant d’en-dehors de notre système solaire.
‘Oumuamua est le premier astéroïde interstellaire jamais observé. Rien que pour cela, ce dernier suscite déjà l’intérêt des chercheurs du monde entier. Mais en plus, l’étrange objet céleste découvert en octobre par une équipe d’astronomes hawaïens (d’où son nom qui signifie « messager ») a une forme allongée très peu commune, un peu comme un cigare.
Il n’en fallait pas plus pour que des journalistes et des fans de science fiction se mettent à le comparer à l’astéroïde Rama, du roman d’Arthur Clarke Rendez-vous avec Rama. En même temps, il faut bien avouer qu’il y a quelques similitudes. Dans cet ouvrage, Rama s’avère être un vestige de vaisseau extra-terrestre.
Le SETI sur le coup
Les fans de science-fiction seront donc heureux d’apprendre que l’institut SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence = Recherche d’une Intelligence Extra-terrestre, en français) écoute actuellement l’astéroïde avec ses puissants radiotélescopes ATA et GBT pour voir si des signaux ne s’en échapperaient pas, juste au cas où. L’information nous vient du physicien James Benford. Ce dernier explique dans un article avoir discuté avec Jill Tarter et Andrew Siemion, deux membres du SETI qui lui ont confirmés ces observations.
Le physicien explique dans son article que si l'on exclut les explications les plus probables, il reste la possibilité qu’il s’agisse d’une sonde extra-terrestre. Celle-ci pourrait ainsi avoir pour but de collecter des données sur notre système solaire avant d’en rejoindre un autre. Benford ajoute que vu le nombre de satellites en orbite autour de la Terre, une telle sonde capterait facilement nos ondes. Il s’agit donc voir si la sonde potentielle n'envoie pas de signaux en réponse.
Bien sûr, il n’y a quasiment aucune chance que l’astéroïde soit réellement un appareil extra-terrestre. D’ailleurs Karen Meech, en charge de l’équipe hawaïenne qui a découvert l’astéroïde, disait il y a deux jours au New York Times que les observations menées jusqu’à maintenant tendent à démontrer qu’il s’agit bien d’un objet naturel, mais on peut toujours rêver.
MIT researchers design forest domes for Mars colonists
MIT researchers design forest domes for Mars colonists
A multidisciplinary MIT project promises to offer Mars colonists safe, sustainable, efficient, and comfortable housing. The project won the Mars City Design competition which focuses on creating sustainable habitats for Mars colonists.
The MIT team won first place for urban design with the Redwood Forest, a series of woodsy habitats enclosed in open, public domes that would reside on the Martian surface.
Image credits: Valentina Sumini.
The domes can house as many as 50 people, offering them not only a place to sleep but also open space with plants and water coming from Mars’ Northern Plains. Everything will be built upon a network of underground tunnels called roots, which not only connect different domes but also protect colonizers from cosmic radiation, extreme thermal changes, or micrometeorite impacts.
In total, the domes could host a city of 10,000 colonists. The city will “physically and functionally mimic a forest,” as every dome will manage solar energy and water in a tree-like fashion.
“Every tree habitat in Redwood Forest will collect energy from the sun and use it to process and transport the water throughout the tree, and every tree is designed as a water-rich environment. Water fills the soft cells inside the dome providing protection from radiation, helps manage heat loads, and supplies hydroponic farms for growing fish and greens,” says MIT doctoral student George Lordos, who was also involved with the project.
Redwood Forest is filled with domes, or what the team calls tree habitats.
Credits: Valentina Sumini.
MIT postdoc Valentina Sumini was the leader of the project. She says that the aim of the project isn’t only to build a functional and sustainable environment, but also one that would be comfortable.
“On Mars, our city will physically and functionally mimic a forest, using local Martian resources such as ice and water, regolith (or soil), and sun to support life. Designing a forest also symbolizes the potential for outward growth as nature spreads across the Martian landscape. Each tree habitat incorporates a branching structural system and an inflated membrane enclosure, anchored by tunneling roots. The design of a habitat can be generated using a computational form-finding and structural optimization workflow developed by the team. The design workflow is parametric, which means that each habitat is unique and contributes to a diverse forest of urban spaces.”
That last part means that similar designs and approaches could also be used for other purposes, including here on Earth. For instance, the tree habitat design could create comfortable working spaces in harsh environments such as the Arctic, barren deserts, or the seafloor. The underground network system could provide easy local transport for electric vehicles, while hydroponic gardening beneath cities could provide fresh fish, fruits, and vegetables with lower land and transportation costs, an idea which is already picking up steam in many cities of the world.
Just a few years from now, NASA expects to land a new rover mission on the red planet. The Mars 2020 mission will feature a rover which is very similar in terms of specs and appearance to its predecessor, the Curiosity rover. There will be some marked improvements, however, that will make landing the rover safer but also enhance its alien-life-hunting features, which is the mission’s main objective.
Artist impression of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover studying a Mars rock outrcrop. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Landing a 2,000-pound science experiment on wheels more than 55 million miles away is quite the achievement in itself. In a maneuver that had never been tried before on another planet, a rocket-powered sky crane lowered Curiosity to the Martian surface on cables, then flew off and crash-landed intentionally a safe distance away.
Since it first touched down on Martian soil in 2012, Curiosity has provided researchers with a trove of data and new science. Thanks to Curiosity, we now have a far clearer and accurate image of the Martian environment including its radiation levels, geology, soil chemical composition, and much more. It has beamed back high-resolution photos of ancient streambeds and drilled martian rocks on site, around Mars’ 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater. Here, the rover found evidence that a nearby area known as Yellowknife Bay was part of a lake that could have supported microbial life.
Big wheels to fill
The upcoming Mars 2020 mission aims to further Curiosity’s legacy. Much of it will be, in fact, based on Curiosity, with about 85 percent of the new rover’s mass being based on “heritage hardware” — system designs and spare hardware employed by Curiosity.
“The fact that so much of the hardware has already been designed—or even already exists—is a major advantage for this mission,” said Jim Watzin, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. “It saves us money, time and most of all, reduces risk.”
Of course, there will also be new cutting-edge tech onboard, like instruments designed to identify biosignatures on a microbial scale. A ground-penetrating radar will now be able to ‘see’ under the surface of Mars, mapping layers of rock, water, and ice up to 10 meters (30 feet) deep. The rover will also feature new imaging equipment including color cameras and a zoom lens. To top things off, a laser will vaporize rocks and soil to analyze their chemistry.
“Our next instruments will build on the success of MSL, which was a proving ground for new technology,” said George Tahu, NASA’s Mars 2020 program executive. “These will gather science data in ways that weren’t possible before.”
For the mission, NASA plans to drill at least 20 rock cores, possibly up to 40, and return them to Earth. These samples might help answer one of the most important questions on scientists’ minds right now: Are we alone in the Universe?
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is also working on new landing tech, like terrain-relative navigation. As the descent stage carrying the 2020 rover approaches the Marian surface, instruments will compare what they ‘see’ with pre-loaded terrain maps such that the rover is guided to its landing site as safely as possible. Another related tech called the range trigger uses location and velocity to determine the optimal time to fire the spacecraft’s parachute.
“Terrain-relative navigation enables us to go to sites that were ruled too risky for Curiosity to explore,” said Al Chen of JPL, the Mars 2020 entry, descent and landing lead. “The range trigger lets us land closer to areas of scientific interest, shaving miles—potentially as much as a year—off a rover’s journey.”
We don’t exactly where Mars 2020 will land but we will likely soon find out by the end of next year. In February, the potential drop sites were narrowed down from eight to three: an ancient lakebed called Jezero Crater; Northeast Syrtis, where warm waters may have chemically interacted with subsurface rocks; and possible hot springs at Columbia Hills. All of these sites are varied and very different from Gale Crater, but they all have great potential for finding signs of past or present alien life.
“In the coming years, the 2020 science team will be weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each of these sites,” Farley said. “It is by far the most important decision we have ahead of us.”
One of the most advanced and mysterious ancient peoples, the Indus River Valley civilization, was completely lost to history until the 1920s.
The ruins of Mohenjo daro (“Hill of the Dead”), one of the jewels of the Indus Valley Civilization and the ancient world.
Some five millennia ago, a people settling the lands between today’s Afganistan, northwest India, and Pakistan rose to the forefront of civilization, knowledge, and sophistication at the time. The echoes of their achievements still awe us to this day, showing a level of civilization almost unimaginable for a people that had, ultimately, risen directly from the Stone Age.
But this beacon of antiquity crumbled and was forgotten, likely under the weight of issues that fall worryingly close to those of today: food and water insecurity powered by climate change.
The Indus River Valley civilization, also known as the Harappan civilization after the first site of their discovery, is a Bronze Age culture that spanned roughly from 3300 to 1300 BC. It stood toe to toe with the three other ancient heavyweights of the world — Egypt, Mesopotamia, and ancient China — often surpassing their scientific achievements; out of the four ancient cradles of civilization, the people of the Indus Valley could claim to be the largest and arguably most prosperous.
Their success was built on a solid agricultural base (they grew various crops, from dates to cotton) and cutting-edge technologies, including indoor plumbing, sophisticated city-planning and public sewage systems, breakthroughs in crafting techniques, writing, and one of the most advanced understandings of metallurgy at the time. They also seem to have been a peaceful people; despite their skill with metal, we’ve found strikingly few Harappan weapons. Not the same thing can be said about their children’s toys, however, of which they seemingly couldn’t get enough of, both in quantity and variety.
The Harappans are one of the most mysterious groups to, tragically, never truly ma ke it out of antiquity. Despite its status as an economic, technological, and social powerhouse, the Harappan civilization simply fell apart in a span of two or three centuries. The reasons as to why this happened are still a subject of passionate debate and they may be more relevant now than ever before.
2. Discovery
The Ten Indus Scripts, discovered near the northern gateway of the Dholavira citadel in India.
Image via Wikipedia.
In 1856, British colonial officials in India were busy overseeing railway construction efforts between the cities of Lahore and Karachi (today part of Pakistan), right along the valley of the Indus River. Digs performed as part of this building effort stumbled upon an incredible stash of artifacts — hundreds of thousands of fire-baked bricks, buried in the dry terrain. They looked quite old, but some were nevertheless used for the railway’s track ballast or its roadbed. Soon, exquisitely-carved soapstone (steatite) artifacts were also making an appearance throughout the bricks. Unwittingly, these workers had unearthed the first slivers of a civilization lost in the depths of time.
Despite the sheer size of the discovery, major excavations didn’t start until much later. This is quite vexing, as the first recorded notes regarding the civilization come from 1826, penned by a British army deserter named James Lewis/Charles Masson, who noticed the presence of mounded ruins at a small local town called Harappa while posing as an American engineer. Partly, this lag came down to archaeologists assuming the bricks and ruins were crafted during the Maurya Empire, which dominated India between 322 and 185 BCE. It was only after excavation works started at the site in 1920 under John Marshall, then the director of the Archaeological Survey of India, that it became clear they were dealing with another culture altogether.
The newly re-discovered civilization would receive its name from this site at Harappa, and pushed the known history of India back by at least 1500 years. In the meantime, archaeologists have scrambled to understand the Indus River Valley civilization — but we’ve been able to confirm frustratingly little from all we’ve found.
3. Size and origin
The Harappans at their peak. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
The Harappans seem to hail from a town named Mehgarh, nestled in the foothills of a mountain pass in today’s western Pakistan. Evidence points to human habitation in the area as far back as 7000 BC. Archaeologists have broken their evolution down into three steps or phases:
Early Harappan from 3300 to 2600 BC,
Mature Harappan from 2600 to 1900 BC, towards the end of which the civilization starts going into decline, and
Late Harappan from 1900 to 1300 BC, marked by violence, breakdowns in social order, the abandonment of most settlements, and the eventual extinction of the Indus Valley people.
But when things were going well for the Harappans, they were really good. So far, more than 1,052 Harappan cities and settlements have been found, mainly in the general region of the Indus River and its tributary rivers. At their peak, they are estimated to have numbered five million souls.
4. Culture, language, and beliefs
One of the reasons why we can’t figure the Harappans out that well is their writing. We know they had a kind of writing, because we found some of their texts, etched on clay and stone tablets dated between 3300-3200 BC, at Harappa. They appear to have been written right to left in a script which we, unfortunately, don’t understand. The symbols resemble plant and trident-like shapes and are completely unlike anything we’ve ever seen. This has led many researchers to believe that Harappan script evolved independently of those in Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China.
It also means that we don’t actually know any Harappan names, the name of their cities, or what they called themselves. We refer to them by names we ourselves have given them — just something to keep in mind as you read further on.
Samples of Indus script. Image via omniglot.
In the absence of any known names or words, without any bi-lingual texts or clear cultural ties to compare or infer from, it’s nigh-impossible to understand the script of a dead language. But it does have the hallmarks of a language, researchers have found, a conclusion that is sure to goad curiosity further.
“At this point, we can say that the Indus script seems to have statistical regularities that are in line with natural languages,” said Rajesh Rao, a University of Washington researcher who led a study in 2009 analyzing if Indus script shows ‘conditional entropy’, a structural semi-predictability that underlies functional languages.
Indus Valley religion also eludes our understanding. Unlike their Egyptian and Mesopotamian counterparts, the Harappans didn’t build any temples or palaces (that we know of), so we don’t have any evidence pointing to specific deities or their religious practices. However, many of their artifacts (in the form of seals) showcase animals. Some depict them being carried in a ceremony, while others include downright mythological creatures such as unicorns. Thus, some researchers have speculated that religion in the Indus Valley centered, in some way, on animals. Others have suggested that the animals on these seals instead signified one’s membership to a group such as a clan, social class, so forth. Until more evidence is gleaned, neither can be fully supported or refuted.
We have, however, found ample evidence of Harappan art and culture, including sculptures, seals, pottery, gold jewelry, as well as anatomically detailed figurines in terracotta, bronze, and steatite.
Left: Indus priest or king statue. The statue is 17.5 cm high and carved from steatite. It was found in Mohenjo-daro in 1927. Right: A collection of Indus valley seals with their molds. Images via Wikimedia, modified.
The evidence points to a flourishing culture, but the lack of writing in particular spells doom for our efforts to understand how these people ruled themselves — legal codes, procedures, and systems of governance, after all, are rooted in written documents. This, again, is especially frustrating, as we’re going to see that the Harappans were extremely adept at ordering and coordinating their society, for the benefits of all those it harbored.
5. Science and know-how
One of the most striking features of Harrapan society was their propensity for standardization. Pottery and seals use surprisingly similar proportions. Bricks are virtually identical in size, shape, weight, and material, even among different cities. Weighs used in trading are also virtually identical. The level of standardization is so high, in fact, that some researchers claim it could only be the product of a single state authority enforcing them on all communities in the area. However, the pointed scarcity of weapons makes it more likely that the Indus Valley people were led by a number of leaders representing each major community or cluster of communities, all working together voluntarily. This view is supported by studies on Indus graves and human remains that show everyone enjoyed similar health and a relative scarcity of elite burials — suggesting they had no rulers, as we understand the term, and that everyone enjoyed equal status.
Remains of a washroom drainage system in Lothal. Notice the quality bricks, millennia old, used for its construction. Image via Wikimedia.
While most of the Harappan settlements were only villages or small towns, the civilization had several large urban centers. Among those we’ve found are Harappa, Ganeriwala, and Mohenjo-daro in modern-day Pakistan and Dholavira, Kalibangan, Rakhigarhi, Rupar, and Lothal in modern-day India. Out of the lot, Mohenjo-daro became the largest city of the Indus Valley Civilization and holds the multiple distinctions of being one of the world’s first major urban centers, as well as, at the time, one of the most sophisticated cities in the world and a global architectonical and engineering masterpiece.
The Harappan fire-baked brick was produced and used on a massive scale in construction. Not only were they surprisingly standardized, as we’ve seen, but they’re also strikingly advanced for the time (with sun-baked bricks being the norm).
The ruins of their major cities show that a lot of effort went into urban planning. Houses, workshops, and trading spots each formed distinct neighborhoods, and cities had well-organized wastewater drainage and trash collection systems, granaries, even public baths. This efficient layout further suggests that local governments were present and of high quality, working with great efficiency and aiming particularly to maintain public hygiene (or possibly, religious ritual).
Both Harappa and Mohenjo-daro featured citadels, heavily fortified areas thick with defensive structures — a feature other important and well-off cities likely shared. They had administrative (and possibly religious) centers that were also fortified. The walls are speculated to have played a double role, protecting the Harappans both from invasions and floods.
Another distinctive feature of the Indus people was that they didn’t really build to awe. We know they could build impressive structures, as they show an advanced understanding of architecture with dockyards, granaries, warehouses, and protective walls. But there’s no conclusive evidence of any palaces ever being built here. Neither of temples. In fact, the largest Indus buildings we’ve found so far were likely granaries. The nearest thing we’ve found to a ‘monument’ is in Mohenjo-daro — the Great Bath, a public bathing and social area.
Why build a mountain of limestone for one dude to be buried in when you can have a bath for everyone to enjoy? I like these Harappan people. Image via Pinterest.
In addition to architecture and urban theory, Harappans made repeated breakthroughs in metalworking (which was the day’s rocket science), working copper, tin, lead, and bronze, and had skilled craftsman, as shown by their intricate carnelian carvings. They also made important advances in transport technology, being a contender for the “first civilization to use the wheel” prize, in the form of oxcarts that are pretty much identical to those seen today throughout South Asia. Sailing was also, by all evidence, serious business for the Indus, who built boats and sea-worthy ships. This is supported by the discovery of a massive dredged canal and a suspected docking facility in Lothal, on the Indian Ocean’s coast, and the use of seashells in their arts and crafts.
6. Money and economy
The Harappans maintained one of the most impressive ancient trade empires and improved transport technologies, maintaining maritime trade networks extending from the Middle East to Central Asia. Evidence for these networks includes Harappian shellwork, found as far as the Arabian Gulf in Oman, as well as seals and jewelry found at archaeological sites in regions of Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq-Kuwait-Syria area). There’s also speculation that Harappian traders traversed long distances over water in ships made of planks, with a single mast and a sail of cloth or woven rushes.
Ceramics from the area show similarities to those from northern Iran between 4300 and 3200 BC, suggesting trade between these areas during that time. Similarities in pottery, seals, figurines, and ornaments from Central Asia and the Iranian plateau during the Early Harappan suggests land trade was established to these areas during the time.
Trade focused mostly on securing raw materials which were used to fuel Harappan workshops. Imports included minerals from Iran and Afghanistan, lead and copper from other parts of India, jade from China, and cedar wood floated down rivers from the Himalayas and Kashmir. Other traded items included terracotta pots, processed metals, gold and silver, tool-grade flints, as well as jewelry and its associated materials: beads, seashells, pearls, and colored gemstones, such as lapis lazuli and turquoise.
7. Decline
By around 1800 BC, the Indus Valley Civilization was starting to crack. A widely-accepted theory is that they fell to a nomadic Indo-European tribe called Aryans, which invaded and subsequently conquered the Harappians. Evidence in support of this comes from the fact that cities were being abandoned at the time and an increase in the apparent incidence of violence and violent death — which both fit with what you’d expect to see in a war zone.
More recent evidence, however, contradicts this theory. Some experts believe that the collapse was caused by climate change. By 1800 BC, the whole area grew colder and drier, and it’s suspected that tectonic movements in the area heavily disrupted or diverted the rivers on which the Harappans relied. The drying of the Saraswati River, which began around 1900 BC, is believed to be a major driver of these local changes. Combined with monsoon-associated periods of flooding and drought, these changes in river patterns splintered the once-monolithic block of the Indus Valley Civilization.
Farmers fled eastwards, towards the basin of the Ganges. While the river allowed them to re-establish villages and farms, these communities could not dream to produce the same agricultural surplus as the Indus River basin and the refined irrigation systems built there. Faced with starvation, large cities tore themselves apart or vacuated for rural settings. Without their craftsmen, trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia shriveled and then ended altogether.
This latter theory is supported by the presence of Indus Civilization elements in later cultures, called Harappan cultures, more in line with a slow decline than a fast disappearance at sword-point.
Whatever the reason, by around 1700 BCE, most of the Indus Valley Civilization cities had been abandoned. With them, the Harappan people’s stars waned, never to recover.
ALIEN MESSAGE TO MANKIND: "DO YOU WISH THAT WE SHOW UP?"
Analyzing the thousands of documents through which contacts with extraterrestrial beings have been verified, it can be deduced that there are five types of messages that "they" want to spread:
THE FIRST
Ecology:Space visitors tell their contactees that humanity is corrupting everything, that the seas and oxygen are being contaminated with chemical and industrial toxic waste that atomic bombs endanger life on the planet , usually warn of great dangers if the situation is not corrected, remember the global warming that we are currently suffering.
THE SECOND
Scientist: In many cases, a large number of scientific knowledge has been delivered to humans that are kept secret by governments, mainly the North American and Soviet governments. They also usually send illiterate people to transmit scientific communications to scientists.
THE THIRD
Technician: Many contactees have received the knowledge with concrete instructions to build state-of-the-art devices. We should not be surprised when a large number of inventors demand the patent of artifacts whose usefulness we do not yet know and perhaps we never know.
THE FOURTH
Cosmogenic: Another type of message is related to the origin of the Universe and the existence of God whom the aliens call The First Cause or The Deep The Supreme Intelligence.
THE FIFTH:
Moral: They establish a set of norms of life, curiously usually reinforces the moral or religious beliefs of the contactee by understanding the brotherhood as well as the love among peers asking that the message be disseminated in order to be known by the greater number of people.
The original source of this information appears to be by Mr. Jean Ederman, now 49, of France, who evidently works in the field of aviation. He writes: "... after having learned how to mentally project myself to a place in the presence of benevolent extraterrestrials, I received the following message..."
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
SCIENTISTS DATE THE TOMB OF CHRIST REVEALING ITS COMPLEX HISTORY
SCIENTISTS DATE THE TOMB OF CHRIST REVEALING ITS COMPLEX HISTORY
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is said to be the place where the body of Jesus Christ was interned following his crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. Now, archaeological examinations of the site suggest that there is a deeply complex history around this holiest of all Christian shrines.
A new scientific examination of the site where Jesus is believed to have been laid to rest has utilized chemicals in the limestone making up deepest reaches of the cave to discover how long it had been since the rock had been exposed to light. They found that these oldest areas of the cave were around 1700 years old and that some of the other rock laid on in the cave dated to the era of the Crusades.
The New Testament states that Jesus was put to death in the early years of the first millennium and that the Romans located and enshrined his tomb around the year 326 AD. This ambitious project was undertaken by Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity and declare it to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. Along with his wife, who was also a devout Christian, he ordered a number of projects of this nature as well as the erection of large Christian shrines throughout the entire Empire. This date historical documents suggest that Constantine ordered the enshrinement of Jesus’s tomb tallies up neatly to the age of the layered limestone in the cave uncovered by scientists investigating the site suggesting that this is indeed the tomb of Christ.
There has been a great deal of speculation as to whether the real location of Jesus’s tomb had been lost over the years. During the Crusades, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was completely destroyed and subsequently rebuilt by the Christians in the area. This has led to questions as to whether they truly built on the exact same site as the Romans. Some historians have said that even if they did manage to build on the correct spot, that the Romans may not have located the tomb of Jesus Christ accurately.
Archaeologists and historians concede that there is no way of telling whether the tomb most definitely held the body of Jesus Christ but it is still considered to be far and away the best candidate. According to Dan Bahat, the former city archaeologist of Jerusalem, "We may not be absolutely certain that the Holy Sepulchre Church is the site of Jesus' burial, but we certainly have no other site that can lay a claim nearly as weighty."
Last October, the tomb was opened to the public for the first time in many centuries after the painstaking restoration of the shrine enclosing the tomb which is known as the Edicule. The restoration project took nine months to complete and cost a staggering $4 million.
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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 74 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.
The Alien Message To All Mankind
Did Alien Beings Genetically Engineer Human Mankind? 
Scientists Shock The World By Revealing These Ancient Hand Prints Were Not Left By Humans
This Underground Complex Is A Million Years Old. Man-Made Or History 
