The “Doomsday Clock” Is Now Set at “Two Minutes to Midnight”

 

Wikipedia

{ https://futurism.com/ }

27-01-2018 om 00:13 geschreven door peter  

Proof of alien life? TV host captures UFO image in the midst of storm

By Nirmal Narayanan

Figoni soon posted the images on his Facebook page, and it went viral in no time. In his post, Figoni assured that the strange object which he filmed was not a plane. The images soon reached the fingertips of conspiracy theorists and they strongly claimed that it is an alien UFO came from deep space. The object is bright, and it seems the extra-terrestrials have switched on the lights of the saucer to enhance vision during the storm.

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Fernando Figoni

op dinsdag

NO ERA UN AVION, NO ERA UNA BOLSA A ESA DISTANCIA, TRES FOTOS DISTINTAS EL MISMO OBJETO BRILLANTE SE VIO EN DISTINTOS BARRIOS

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After some hours, Figoni posted another image on his Facebook featuring a UFO, and he claimed that this photo was sent by one of his friends. The image features a UFO flying in front of a passenger plane. However, this image does not seem so authentic, and people suspect that CGI has been used to generate it.

UFO sightings are increasing all around the world post-2017. Some days back, a mysterious globe-like UFO was captured in a camera from an Arizona desert, and the YouTube channel which posted the video stated that it was filmed by police officials who were out for patrolling.

A similar UFO sighting happened in Thailand too, but later it was clarified that it was not a UFO but flying saucer-shaped pod clouds.

{ http://www.ibtimes.sg/ }

26-01-2018 om 23:51 geschreven door peter  

'WHAT is it?' TV star stunned after taking THIS eerie photo of 'UFO' in the eye of a storm

A TV and radio presenter took a photograph of dramatic clouds brewing in the distance and later spotted what internet users said was a UFO in the eye of the storm.

{https://www.express.co.uk/ }

26-01-2018 om 23:35 geschreven door peter  

New Zealand startup launches huge ‘disco ball’ into space. It’s now the brightest object in the night sky

BY TIBI PUIU 

Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck next to the mirror-covered sphere his company sent into Earth’s orbit.

Credit: Rocket 

An up-and-coming aerospace company from New Zealand made history last week when it deployed what can only be classed as a giant disco ball, of all things, into Earth’s low orbit. The flashing strobe was launched with Electron — a two-stage orbital launch vehicle developed over the last decade by Rocket Lab — alongside a less artistic payload comprised of two commercial satellites.

Turning the planet into a huge planet

Rocket Lab says that the art project called Humanity Star, which was launched on January 21, should now be the brightest object in the night sky. Although it’s now visible between latitudes between 46° north and 46° south, people in mainland United States will eventually be able to see the cosmic disco ball with the naked eye. In time, the object’s orbit will tilt and, provided that the observer and the orbiting strobe are perfectly aligned, almost the entire world will be able to see Humanity Star at night and dawn. Such favorable conditions will occur from March onward.

“No matter where you are in the world, or what is happening in your life, everyone will be able to see the Humanity Star in the night sky,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in a statement. “For us to thrive and survive, we need to make big decisions in the context of humanity as a whole, not in the context of individuals, organizations or even nations. …We must come together as a species to solve the really big issues like climate change and resource shortages.”

The carbon-fiber geodesic sphere is a little over a meter (3.3 ft) in diameter and is covered in 65 highly reflective panels. Because of its 90-minute polar orbit, the satellite will also be visible to a lot of people.

Humanity Star is designed to be visible to everyone on Earth.

Credit: Rocket Lab.

The New Zealand engineers also took space junk into consideration. Instead of launching new litter into space, the team behind the iridium sphere were careful to set it on a nine-month orbit that will eventually return it to the atmosphere where the satellite will disintegrate. For the curious, there’s a tracking app on the Humanity Star website which you can use to make it easier to spot the sphere.

Of course, Humanity Star isn’t the only man-made object orbiting the Earth which is visible to the naked eye. A classic example is the International Space Station (ISS), which is the size of a football field and whose extended solar panels shine brightly in the sun. Humanity Star, however, flies at a far lower orbit and is essentially covered in mirrors, making it more visible than the ISS.

This was Rocket Lab’s debut orbital flight. Beyond launching a weird art project, Rocket Lab achieved some more practical milestones like performing the first liftoff in New Zealand or the Southern Hemisphere, for that matter.

Not everyone is excited about parading ‘art’ through Earth’s orbit, however. On Twitter, various astronomers expressed their disappointment and concerns. Some, people like Ian Griffin, an astrophotographer and the director of New Zealand’s Otago Museum, even went as far as calling it an “act of environmental vandalism”.

Whether this is merely a publicity stunt or a genuine art project meant to inspire people is entirely up to your own interpretation.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

26-01-2018 om 23:24 geschreven door peter  

Two men and two women spent 200 days in a virtual Chinese moon base. Here’s what happened

BY MIHAI ANDREI 

Four Chinese volunteers spent 200 days in a simulated space lab in Beijing, breaking the record for the longest stay in a self-sustaining cabin. They had no input from the outside world, grew their own food, and handled their own waste.

Four volunteers lived in the sealed lab to simulate a long-term space mission with no input from the outside world.

Image credits: China National Space Administration.

China’s lunar base plans are becoming more and more serious, but before they actually send astronauts there, they want to know how they can handle the rough conditions on the moon — so they set up a “virtual” base, here on Earth. They called it the Lunar Palace.

The Lunar Palace has two plant modules where pretend astronauts can grow and harvest their own food, as well as a living cabin with living facilities. The cabin is basically a 42 square meter area (450 square feet) containing four sleeping cubicles, a common room, a bathroom, a waste treatment, and even a room for growing animals.

The main focus of the experiment was to see how the Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS) functions over a longer period of time in a lunar-like environment. Within the BLSS, humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms are expected to co-exist together safely. Astronauts grow their own food in the form of experimental crops, and they also manage their own waste.

Of course, a secondary objective of the study was to see how the volunteers would withstand the psychological stress of being isolated in such a small cabin.

The four volunteers were biomedicine students from Beihang University, and they handled the situation quite well, the module’s chief designer Liu Hong told Xinhua. As if the entire experience wasn’t challenging enough, the lab hosting the experiment experienced unexpected blackouts. This “challenged the system as well as the psychological status of the volunteers, but they withstood the test,” Liu said.

Not much else has currently been disclosed about the experiments and the mental state of the participants.

It’s not the first time such an experiment was carried out at the Lunar Palace. A successful 105-day trial was carried out in 2014. However, this type of experiment has been going on for a long time, since the Soviets had three people spend 180 days in a similarly closed ecosystem in the early 1970s.

In recent years, China has spent tremendous sums to advance its space program, and the results are showing.

Ultimately, China wants to build its own moon base within a decade, potentially in a partnership with the European Union. The Chinese Space Program is one of the world’s most active, advanced, and successful. Aside from the moon base, they want to establish a crewed space station (much like the International Space Station), send an unmanned rover to Mars, and exploit the Earth-Moon space for industrial development — namely, developing space-based solar powered satellites that would beam energy back to Earth.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

26-01-2018 om 23:07 geschreven door peter  

Two men and two women spent 200 days in a virtual Chinese moon base. Here’s what happened

BY MIHAI ANDREI 

Four Chinese volunteers spent 200 days in a simulated space lab in Beijing, breaking the record for the longest stay in a self-sustaining cabin. They had no input from the outside world, grew their own food, and handled their own waste.

Four volunteers lived in the sealed lab to simulate a long-term space mission with no input from the outside world.

Image credits: China National Space Administration.

China’s lunar base plans are becoming more and more serious, but before they actually send astronauts there, they want to know how they can handle the rough conditions on the moon — so they set up a “virtual” base, here on Earth. They called it the Lunar Palace.

The Lunar Palace has two plant modules where pretend astronauts can grow and harvest their own food, as well as a living cabin with living facilities. The cabin is basically a 42 square meter area (450 square feet) containing four sleeping cubicles, a common room, a bathroom, a waste treatment, and even a room for growing animals.

The main focus of the experiment was to see how the Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS) functions over a longer period of time in a lunar-like environment. Within the BLSS, humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms are expected to co-exist together safely. Astronauts grow their own food in the form of experimental crops, and they also manage their own waste.

Of course, a secondary objective of the study was to see how the volunteers would withstand the psychological stress of being isolated in such a small cabin.

The four volunteers were biomedicine students from Beihang University, and they handled the situation quite well, the module’s chief designer Liu Hong told Xinhua. As if the entire experience wasn’t challenging enough, the lab hosting the experiment experienced unexpected blackouts. This “challenged the system as well as the psychological status of the volunteers, but they withstood the test,” Liu said.

Not much else has currently been disclosed about the experiments and the mental state of the participants.

It’s not the first time such an experiment was carried out at the Lunar Palace. A successful 105-day trial was carried out in 2014. However, this type of experiment has been going on for a long time, since the Soviets had three people spend 180 days in a similarly closed ecosystem in the early 1970s.

In recent years, China has spent tremendous sums to advance its space program, and the results are showing.

Ultimately, China wants to build its own moon base within a decade, potentially in a partnership with the European Union. The Chinese Space Program is one of the world’s most active, advanced, and successful. Aside from the moon base, they want to establish a crewed space station (much like the International Space Station), send an unmanned rover to Mars, and exploit the Earth-Moon space for industrial development — namely, developing space-based solar powered satellites that would beam energy back to Earth.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

26-01-2018 om 23:07 geschreven door peter  

When someone says they plan to “break the vacuum,” this probably means they’re a parent about to attempt to clean a room normally occupied by a teenager … unless they’re a laser physicist. Then it means they’re getting ready to use a laser to rip a hole in empty space and pull out the matter/antimatter combo of electrons and positrons. Isn’t ripping holes in space the job of the Large Hadron Collider? Regardless of who is doing the ripping, is this a good idea?

As with many sci-fi-to-real-life stories these days (see “Cloning monkeys”), this news comes out of China, where physicist Ruxin Li is leading a team at the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (is “superintense ultrafast” redundant or scary or both?) in developing a laser that will create the world’s most powerful light pulses. How powerful? The team has already built a record-breaking laser that distills light into pulses measuring 5.3 million billion watts or petawatts. They’re nearing completion of a 10 petawatt laser that is 1,000 times more powerful than the world’s electrical grids … combined. And they’re just five years away from a machine with the doomsday-ish name of the Station of Extreme Light that will be capable of pulses reaching 100 petawatts.

What do they plan to point the Station of Extreme Light at? As usual, the researchers have a noble cause (also called a ‘cover story’) and a sinister one. The ‘good’ purpose of building a cylinder of sapphire coated with titanium capable of shooting a 100 petawatt laser that can create temperatures never seen on Earth is to help develop new medicines.

Once that’s done, the fun starts. Aiming the Station of Extreme Light at a space vacuum will ‘break the vacuum’ and prove Albert Einstein’s E=mc2 in the reverse direction by creating matter (in this case, electrons and their antimatter counterparts – positrons) from energy. Or, as Li puts it:

“It would mean you could generate something from nothing.”

What could possibly go wrong?

That probably depends on where you aim the Station of Extreme Light. China is working on lasers to put in orbit and disintegrate space junk, debris and perhaps dangerous asteroids. The U.S. Department of Energy is developing ground lasers to knock out drones. In its non-weapon form, the Station of Extreme Light is a particle accelerator that is, unlike the Large Hadron Collider, inexpensive, small and easy to build. That could put the LHC out of business … and potentially put that power in the hands of entities whose purposes may not be as noble as those of government – OK, that’s debatable but we’ve got to believe that someone will control this power. Remember, it’s just the opposite of nuclear power’s matter-to-energy side of Einstein’s theory … and we know how that worked out.

One last thing to think about. China is leading the research in these vacuum-ripping lasers and Russia is not far behind. The U.S. is.

“It would mean you could generate something from nothing.”

Is it time to stop dreaming of phasers and ripping holes and start working on harnessing the power of lasers for something other than a weapon?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

26-01-2018 om 22:54 geschreven door peter  

Alien update: South Texas man films several UFOs hovering across the sky [VIDEO]

By Nirmal Narayanan

A screen grab from YouTube video

{ http://www.ibtimes.sg/ }

26-01-2018 om 19:47 geschreven door peter  

The Maury Island UFO Sighting: History or Hoax, or Does it Even Matter?

By Steve Dunkelberger

What has come down through history as the “Maury Island Incident” remains a matter of investigation, speculation and debate through the retelling of the story in pop culture, investigations and beer-fueled discussions.

The incident involved a reported sighting of flying saucers zooming in the skies off the shores of Commencement Bay’s Maury Island on June 21, 1947, and has fueled conspiracy theories, dives into government archives in search of lost evidence, provided the basis for a movie and is mentioned during walking tours around Tacoma largely because the story is just too juicy to not to be repeated.

“I talk about it all the time,” Tacoma Ghost Toursoperator Andrew Hansen said, noting that while some walking tour attendees sometimes know tidbits of the legend, he tries to tell just what is known rather than what is believed. “I try to stick with as many of the facts as I can.”

That can be a tough job since the conspiracy-filled tale makes for a great story that raises more questions than answers.

The most common retelling of the story has it that Howard Dahl was captaining a boat on the afternoon of June 21, 1947. He was searching the waters for floating logs that he could salvage from the water and sell to the local mills that lined Tacoma’s tideflats. It was an otherwise normal day, when he and his son spotted six flying discs in the sky. Two reportedly collided, damaging one of them. It began to sputter and emit smoke. Chunks of the craft fell from the sky, either splashing in the water or peppering the deck of his salvage boat. Dahl’s son Charles was burned by the falling bits of metal, and his dog was reportedly struck and killed. The mysterious aircraft then flew away and disappeared.

There were other local “sightings” of flying saucers that summer as well. A businessman and avid pilot Kenneth Arnold, for example, then told a story of his own saucer sighting. He reportedly saw nine saucers while flying around Mount Rainier. Stories of flying saucer sightings were in the news, both mainstream newspapers and pulp publications, all with varying degrees of conspiracy and coverup with little evidence to support their claims.

In the story of the sightings by Dahl and Arnold, federal investigators interviewed the two, collected samples of the “saucer slag” the damaged disc had dropped onto Dahl’s boat and left with a warning against telling their stories anymore. Their accounts were later retold in Gray Barker‘s book “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers,” and gave rise to the term “men In black” in mainstream culture as a reference to secretive government agents setting out to hide evidence and coverup alien encounters because Dahl stated the investigators wore the standard “G-man” black suits.

“Paris in Orbit” was the theme of a rollerskating dance party in 1959 at the Tacoma Roller Bowl along South Tacoma Way.

Further fueling the fire of conspiracy was “the fact” that the investigators would later die in a plane crash while transporting the evidence for analysis at Hamilton Field in California. As fate would have it, the crash outside of Kelso was the first plane disaster of the newly formed Air Force, following its separation from the Army to be its own branch of military service.

Here’s where the story begins to fall apart, however. No damage to Dahl’s boat could be found. His son showed no sign of injuries. No evidence that a dog even existed was ever found. The fragments of the saucer that were reportedly recovered were traced back to the nearby copper smelter. The mysterious “men in black” could have easily been investigators calling the whole thing a hoax and warning against Crisman and Dahl retelling the story or face fraud charges for wasting their time. Cap that with the fact that the story wasn’t widely known until after the more famous “Roswell Incident” in New Mexico made national news a few weeks later.

To make the story even weirder, Crisman would later be questioned about him being one of the men on the “grassy knoll” at John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He would later reinvent himself as “Dr. Jon Gold,” an ultra-rightwing talk show host on KAYE Radio that aired in Tacoma in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“We referred to it as radio hate,” former Tacoma Mayor and president of the Tacoma Historical Society Bill Baarsma said of Crisman’s style of radio commentary. “Everything was ‘fake news’ that promoted conspiracy theories about local government and secret deals that were based on secret sources and tips rather than facts and logic.”

What actually happened in 1947 remains a matter of speculation and research to this day. Facts are few and stories are plenty, but whatever the case the Maury Island proves to provide colorful characters, tales of missing evidence and a twist of fantasy wrapped around truth – all the making of a great mystery that will never be solved.

{ http://www.southsoundtalk.com/ }

26-01-2018 om 19:38 geschreven door peter  

Award-Winning UFO Sighting Movie Comes to Yelm

Triad Theater Will Screen ‘The Maury Island Incident’ About Mysterious Happenings Just North of Tacoma Above Puget Sound

By Nisqually Valley News

 

26-01-2018 om 19:26 geschreven door peter  

Book Review: UFO Contacts in Italy

Posted by: Brian Allan 

As an example of the fact that UFOs and ufology are a world-wide phenomenon, the redoubtable Philip Mantle and Flying Disk Press (one of the very few publishers still keeping the public informed about the history of ufology) takes us to what has to be the golden age of subject. This time the revelations come from Roberto Pinotti and the files of ‘Centro Ufologico Nazionale’ (CUN) the leading Italian society who still investigates the phenomenon. Translated from the Italian language, this book is volume one in a series that, in this case, covers the years from 1907 until 1978 and 1958 was especially productive.

The book, which is profusely illustrated with some remarkable images, is an absolute treasure trove of information and the reader can open it at any page and is guaranteed to find something of interest. That said, rather that outright examples of visitations from ETs, the vast majority of examples presented here appear to be ‘high strangeness’ encounters rather than anything else, which are of course still valid and perhaps even more interesting, but not proof of anything extraterrestrial. In fact the book takes a ‘no questions asked’ approach and a refreshingly literalist view of the subject and has obviously been compiled and written by a true believer.

Italian UFO Researcher and Author Robert Pinotti

The author was a friend of, and collaborated with the late Gordon Creighton who was the long time editor of the UK’s Flying Saucer Review (FSR) and his influence becomes clear as one reads the book. Some of the images are astonishing and there are a few of what is claimed to be the inside of a UFO (pages 96 & 97) which also show the pilot who is human looking and is wearing what look like wrap-round sunglasses. There is also a report of analysis carried out on metallic residue left at a landing site, and surprisingly the residue comprises only earthly constituents in various proportions. This is encouraging if, for no other reason, than it seems the elements in the periodic table are universal. There is no doubt that for the dedicated ufologist this book is an essential part of their library and deserved to be read and if anyone is interested the CUN website is:

The book is now available on Amazon in paperback and kindle. You can contact the author and the publisher via the FLYING DISK PRESS blog at:
http://flyingdiskpress.blogspot.co.uk/

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

26-01-2018 om 19:04 geschreven door peter  

Five UFOs Moving In Formation Above Basingstoke

Claims of UFOs surrounded Basingstoke after five mystery lights were recorded on video appearing to fly in formation above the town.

The unnamed man said that he and a colleague noticed the lights in the sky while at work.

In a witness report to MUFON, he said he went outside with a workmate to get something out of the van, and saw one light slowly moving around the back of a building.

Then another one became visible to them from behind the building at a constant distance. Seconds later, another three came to view as if they were already there but were not lit up.

The witness said that after around a minute, they started to swing around slowly and turned around 220 degrees.

After another around a minute, two lights got further away. One stopped, and one appeared to carry on barely being a visible light source.

At this point, he said, they seemed to swing around again in formation.

To get a better view, they decided to run back inside the building and get into the roof.

Unfortunately, they could not see anything because of the fog. They decided to run back down, but those mysterious objects were nowhere to be found.

He said they did not hear noise and see flashing lights, ruling out helicopters and civilian aircraft.

He also ruled out searchlights shining up from the ground as they could clearly see the surface area of the lights getting wider as it shone down, which could entail that the light source was in the sky.

The sighting reportedly lasted around 30 minutes, and the witness had managed to take roughly four minutes of video.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

26-01-2018 om 18:58 geschreven door peter  

Doemdagklok weer minuut dichter bij Apocalyps: “Het is twee voor twaalf” - HLN.be

Bron: Washington Post, CBC

De klok, die in gebruik is sinds 1947, is een metafoor die aangeeft hoe dicht we staan bij de vernietiging van de aarde. Een groep wetenschappers en nucleaire experts die zich gezamenlijk het ‘Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ noemen, komen op regelmatige basis samen om de tijd op de Doemdagklok te bespreken.

Lees ook

Waarom het einde van de wereld echt nabij is, volgens deze wetenschapper

“Met grote bezorgdheid passen we de Doemdagklok vanaf vandaag aan,” zegt Rachel Bronson, voorzitter en CEO van het Bulletin: “Het is nu twee minuten voor middernacht”.

Nucleaire en klimaatbedreigingen

De organisatie doet de nieuwe aanpassing omdat “president Trump en andere wereldleiders er niet in slagen om de op de loer liggende bedreigingen van een nucleaire oorlog en de klimaatverandering aan te pakken,” luidt het.

“De wereld is nu niet alleen gevaarlijker dan een jaar geleden: het is van Wereldoorlog II geleden dat de situatie nog zo dreigend was,” schrijven Lawrence M. Krauss en Robert Rosner, twee medewerkers van het Bulletin in The Washington Post. “De Doemdagklok staat in feite even dicht bij middernacht als in 1953, toen de vrees om de Koude Oorlog mogelijk op haar hoogtepunt was.”

De oplopende spanningen tussen de VS en Noord-Korea dragen volgens de wetenschappers bij tot de aanpassing van de Doemdagklok. “Zeggen dat de nucleaire toestand van de wereld schrijnend is, is een onderschatting van het gevaar en de hoogdringendheid,” zeggen Kraus en Rosner.

Nog slechter dan een jaar geleden

Vorig jaar stelden de wetenschappers de klok nog met een halve minuut bij, van 23:57 naar 23:57:30. “De waarschijnlijkheid van een globale catastrofe is erg hoog en de acties die nodig zijn om de risico’s op een ramp te verkleinen moeten erg dringend genomen worden,” stelde het Bulletin toen.

De eerste keer dat de Doemdagklok werd bijgesteld na haar ingebruikname in 1947, was twee jaar later, nadat de Sovjet-Unie met succes haar eerste atoombom testte. Toen schoof de wijzer van de klok van 23:53 uur naar 23:57 uur.

Het gebeurde nog maar één keer dat het alarmpeil even hoog stond als vandaag: in 1953 gaf de klok aan dat het twee voor twaalf was nadat zowel de VS als de Sovjet-Unie succesvolle proeven met kernbommen hielden binnen een tijdsspanne van amper zes maanden.

In 1991 leek de wereld er het best voor te staan, toen stond de wijzer op 17 minuten voor middernacht.

Verkiezing van Trump

“Telkens wanneer de klok wordt aangepast, beantwoorden we twee vragen,” zei Rachel Bronson vorig jaar in een interview: “Is de wereld veiliger? Of loopt ze een groter risico dan een jaar geleden? En is het veiliger of een groter risico dan ooit eerder in de geschiedenis van de klok?”

Met de aanpassing vragen de wetenschappers aandacht voor wereldwijde crises die volgens hen het bestaan van de mensheid in gevaar brengen. Daarbij richten de wetenschappers de aandacht op de beschikbaarheid van kernwapens en de bereidheid van de wereld om ze te gebruiken. De laatste jaren brengen ze ook de dreigende klimaatverandering mee in rekening.

De organisatie haalde vorig jaar ook de verkiezing van Donald Trump aan als een belangrijke factor, “omdat hij beloofd heeft de vooruiting op beide fronten (kernwapens en klimaatverandering, red.) te verhinderen,” schreven twee leden van het Bulletin vorig jaar. “Nooit eerder heeft het Bulletin beslist om de klok vooruit te zetten voornamelijk omwille van de stellingen van slechts één persoon. Maar wanneer die persoon de nieuwe president is van de Verenigde Staten, dan doen zijn woorden ertoe.”

Symbolisch

Het Bulletin beklemtoont dat de klok symbolisch is en enkel dient als “dringende waarschuwing voor globaal gevaar”.

“We hopen dat de bijstelling van deze klok geïnterpreteerd zal worden zoals ze bedoeld is: als een dringende waarschuwing voor globaal gevaar. De tijd voor wereldleiders om het op de loer liggende nucleaire gevaar en de voortdurende opmars van de klimaatverandering aan te pakken, is al lang voorbij. Het is nu de tijd voor wereldburgers om dringende maatregelen te eisen. Het is tijd om de Doemdagklok terug te draaien,” stellen ze.

{ https://www.hln.be/ } 

26-01-2018 om 18:47 geschreven door peter  

In het geheim gelanceerde discobal schijnt als helderste ster aan de hemel -  HLN.be

BRON : The Guardian

Het nieuwe ruimtevaartbedrijf Rocket Lab breidde onze sterrenhemel vorige vrijdag een beetje uit. De start-up lanceerde toen in alle stilte een raket in een baan rond de aarde. Dat deed het vanop een schapenboerderij op het schiereiland Mahia in Nieuw-Zeeland.

De lancering zorgde voor veel gejubel en trots in Nieuw-Zeeland. Peter Black, oprichter en CEO van het opkomende Rocket Lab, sprak van een bijna ongeëvenaarde stap in de commerciële verkenning van de ruimte.

Discobal

Wat er zo spectaculair is aan de raket, is dat ze naast de klassieke conventionele raketten ook de ‘Humanity Star’ draagt. Die nagemaakte ster bestaat uit een drie meter brede bol en is gemaakt van koolstofvezel. Verder is ze uitgerust met 65 sterk reflecterende panelen en draagt ze daardoor de bijnaam ‘discobal’.

Volgens het bedrijf zal de bol de stralen van de zon naar de aarde weerspiegelen en een knipperlicht creëren dat overal ter wereld zichtbaar is. Er wordt zelfs verwacht dat hijvoor negen maanden lang het helderste object aan de sterrenhemel zal zijn en pas zijn helderheid zal verliezen wanneer hij opnieuw de aardse atmosfeer bereikt.

Volgens Rocket Lab moet de ster een herinnering zijn aan onze kwetsbare plek in het universum. Black voegt daar aan toe dat de bol harmonie en een gedeelde ervaring voor iedereen op de wereld zal creëren.

Lichtvervuiling

Toch blijkt de functie van de spectaculaire uitvinding niet geheel rozengeur en maneschijn. Omdat het hun onderzoek belemmert, vormt lichtvervuiling nu al een enorm probleem voor astronomen. De introductie van een glinsterende discobal in de ruimte wordt dan ook niet overal toegejuicht.

Over de hele wereld uiten astronomen zich op zowel gefundeerde als minder diplomatieke manieren over de Humanity Star. Zo vertelde professor Richard Easter aan The Guardian dat Rocket Lab onbedoeld zijn beroep bijzonder zwaar getroffen heeft en ook zijn collega’s winden er op Twitter geen doekjes om.

Wat er nu gaat gebeuren met de lichtgevende discobal in de ruimte en of hij al dan niet verwijderd zal worden, is nog niet duidelijk. Voor wie de bol nog zou willen waarnemen kan op een online map steeds contoleren waar de bol zich precies bevindt en in welke richting moet worden gekeken om hem goed waar te nemen.

View image on Twitter

Science Insider@SciInsider

For the next 9 months, the brightest object in the night sky will be a tiny, disco-ball-like satellite http://read.bi/2DIApYc 

7:33 PM - Jan 24, 2018

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26-01-2018 om 18:33 geschreven door peter  

Flying Saucer becomes visible in the sky over Jamaica

A strange phenomenon appeared in the sky over St. Ann, Jamaica on January 25, 2018.

Stoney Vill, who has filmed the phenomenon, wonders what the strange ring of lights in the clouds could be.

The video shows sun rays shining from behind a cloud formation, but light from the sun seems to be bending around a disk at the top of the cloud

When zoomed in on the disk, it clearly shows the solid contours of a UFO, a cloaked flying saucer that became temporarily visible. (See video 0.06sec).

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/

26-01-2018 om 18:17 geschreven door peter  

LSU professor debunks alien megastructure myth

26-01-2018 om 00:07 geschreven door peter  

• A professor from Spain says we’re not ready to meet extraterrestrial life
  
• Gabriel De la Torre surveyed 116 students from the US, Italy and Spain
• He found that many had a lack of knowledge in a number of areas
• They also had religious beliefs that would make finding ET a ‘big shock’
• We also focus too much on daily problems than bigger things like Earth
• He concludes we need to improve our ‘global consciousness’

Finding extraterrestrial signals has been dreamed about for decades.

But a researcher from the University of Cádiz in Spain says we shouldn’t be looking – because we’re not ready to meet aliens.

Gabriel De la Torre revealed to MailOnline how his survey of students showed the general level of ignorance and influence of religion would leave us shocked if we made first contact.

A study by Professor Gabriel De la Torre from the University of Cádiz in Spain claims that we’re not ready to make first contact. He claims we’re not prepared mentally or ethically to meet beings unlike ourselves and we should try to improve our ‘global consciousness’

Since 1984 the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) Institute has been looking for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

To date nothing has been found, although the search continues unabated.

Members of the project are now going further by sending out messages from Earth (Active Seti) to try and contact other lifeforms.

But De la Torre, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cádiz and participant in previous projects such as Esa’s Mars 500 (a simulated mission to Mars on Earth), has carried out a study that he claims indicates we are not ready to make contact.

In the study he sent a questionnaire to 116 students in Spain, the US and Italy.

De la Torre tells MailOnline he used students because they ‘will be the future politicians, scientists, the people in charge, so I wanted to know what their knowledge was.’

THE RESULTS AT A GLANCE

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) Institute was established in 1984. Since then it has used a number of observatories around the world, like the Allen Telescope Array (pictured), to try and find alien signals from another world, but so far nothing has been found.

The questions were split into five sections: religious beliefs, the environment, space-related knowledge, their daily activities and their opinions on life issues.

‘In all those areas I defined a different type of question based on other studies that I think related to Seti research,’ De la Torre says.

These included questions such as how likely they thought life was to exist on other planets, what year man first walked on the moon and what the largest planet in the solar system is.

The results were somewhat disconcerting for De la Torre. For example only 82 per cent of the students knew the first moon landing was in 1969.

‘The conclusions were that scientific knowledge, especially the knowledge related to space among college students, is not good,’ he continues.

‘So I think space agencies should increase education efforts.’

On 16 November 1974 the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (pictured) was used to send out a signal called the Arecibo message, a ‘calling card’ from Earth to potential alien races. However De la Torre says we shouldn’t perform ‘Active Seti’ like this as we aren’t ready to make contact

But ultimately it is our lack of appreciation for our own planet and our place in the universe that would be our downfall, he says.

‘We’re not ready to talk to extraterrestrials because global consciousness is not developed enough in the population,’ he concludes.

‘People have daily life problems and the government doesn’t pay attention to global issues like the planet and the environment.

‘That makes us a species too focused on daily life problems, we don’t have an awareness of our surroundings.

‘It’s like when a meteor falls in some place on the planet, it’s big news. But that’s a regular real possibility.

‘If we have a more global consciousness about our situation on the planet, how fragile the planet is, maybe that’s a step in the evolution of our consciousness as a species.

‘There could be other intelligent life out there and it could be really different from us physically, mentally, socially and even morally.

‘They could maybe not even be biological, they could be robots.

‘Right now I don’t think as a species we are ready.

‘Of course some people are ready, but as a species I think it would be a big shock.’

Source www.dailymail.co.uk

{http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/category/aliens/ }

25-01-2018 om 23:52 geschreven door peter  

NASA's Bold Plan to Save Earth From Killer Asteroids - Alien UFO Sightings

Just beyond Earth’s home in the solar system, about 94 million miles from the Sun, a coal-black asteroid slowly rotates as it orbits our star. It’s about 1,650 feet across, with a slight bulge around the middle, like a spinning top. Its low density means it’s not solid, but instead it’s likely a crumbly pile of carbon-rich rocks held together by gravity.

The asteroid is called Bennu, and every six years, its egg-shaped orbital path brings it just 185,000 miles from Earth — roughly 53,000 miles closer than our moon. In about 200 years, there’s a 1-in-2,700 chance it could sail close enough for Earth’s gravity to reel it in. That would be very bad.

The impact would excavate a crater nearly three miles wide and 1,500 feet deep. Locations three miles away would be buried under 50 feet of rock raining down. It would trigger a 6.7-magnitude earthquake. But the real damage would come from the air burst, caused by the meteor hurtling through the atmosphere, which could collapse buildings and tear down trees up to 30 miles away.

Luckily for us, asteroids the size of Bennu, and giant asteroids like the one that helped kill the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, don’t cross Earth’s path often. But smaller ones do all the time. They enter our atmosphere as meteors, where many blow up in mid-air; some make their way to the ground or sea. The good news is that we’re getting better at finding them — but we’re still unprepared if one does make its way to Earth.

Partly to help with this, a NASA spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx is on its way to Bennu, where it will collect several pounds of asteroid samples and return them to Earth. By baking those samples and melting them down, scientists will learn what the asteroid is like, how the solar system’s rocky worlds were made, and how to protect Earth from these errant rocks — whether by pushing them away, breaking them up, or using the sun’s warmth to nudge them a different direction.

In that way, Bennu may become the asteroid that saves us all.

NASA is on an asteroid binge these days. Earlier in January, the space agency announced it is planning two more missions to these solar system crumbs over the next few years. The Lucy spacecraft will fly to Jupiter and study its Trojan asteroids, which trail behind the giant planet. The Psyche mission will travel to an iron asteroid thought to be a leftover planetary core, whose mantle and crust were lost to time and fiery collisions.

These explorations will provide planetary scientists with a wealth of new information, says Bill Bottke, who studies asteroids at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

“Locked in asteroids are stories that are telling us what was going on when the planets formed, when the solar nebula was still around,” he says. What processes does it take to form a planet?”

Fortunately, asteroid studies also tell us what it takes to wreck a planet.

This artist’s rendering shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collecting a sample from the asteroid Bennu using a mechanical arm to touch the asteroid’s surface.

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Via AP

As Bennu whirls around its axis, its inky surface absorbs sunlight like asphalt on a hot day. As it rotates into the dark, that warmth radiates into space and it cools down again. This temperature change gives the asteroid a tiny nudge, called the Yarkovsky effect, which over time will change its orbit.

One of OSIRIS-REx’s main goals is to measure this phenomenon, says Daniel Scheeres, an astronomer at the University of Colorado who works on the project.

“After the mission, we should be able to update all these impact probabilities, and hopefully it will go down,” he says. “Just by testing the theory and validating it with more precise measurements, that can help all of our other predictions of the Yarkovsky effect for all other asteroids.”

Right now we know of about 723,367 asteroids in the solar system, and astronomers from universities and observatories around the world discover new ones almost every day. Based on statistical analysis and detailed searches, scientists think they’ve found more than 90 percent of asteroids about half a mile wide or larger, each of which would cause global extinctions if they impacted earth.

Dedicated searches have also found about 25 percent of the asteroids that measure at least 460 feet across, or roughly the size of a football stadium. But more than a million small asteroids — like one the size of a city bus that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, three years ago — are thought to be out there.

Last year, NASA consolidated its asteroid-hunting efforts under a new program called the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which finds and tracks new objects and will issue warnings about possible impacts. Its budget for the current fiscal year includes $50 million for near-Earth asteroid observations and planetary defense, which is a tenfold increase since the beginning of the Obama administration.

But NASA isn’t the only one hunting asteroids. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency has already brought back bits of one asteroid, and has another mission en route to a second. The privately funded B612 Foundation, named for the asteroid in the French children’s story “The Little Prince,” is still looking for a cash infusion of $450 million to send its telescope into space to look for near-Earth asteroids.

But all this work to find asteroids and to visit them won’t mean much if we can’t do anything about it. There are a few ways to save Earth from an asteroid. We could push it out of the way, essentially using celestial mechanics to ensure it won’t get pulled in by Earth’s gravity, or we could try to destroy the asteroid before it has a chance to destroy us.

The decision depends on how much time we have and what the asteroid is like, says Jason P. Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Some asteroids might be easy to crumble into pieces; some could break apart into smaller stones that hit Earth in multiple places. Others might require a really big shove.

“If it was up to me, I would send a rocket with some titanium dioxide on it and paint it white, and have that Yarkovksy effect accelerate, and move it away from the Earth,” Dworkin says. Titanium dioxide is a common ingredient in sunscreen, and it looks chalky white. A spacecraft could fly to a dangerous asteroid, enter orbit around it, and spray-paint it.

“If you have something like 50 years, that could deflect it enough, and it might be a whole lot simpler than sending up nuclear weapons,” Dworkin says.

Radar images of the near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moonlet from 2003. Didymos will be the target of AIDA’s test of a kinetic impact on a small asteroid. 

NASA

If that doesn’t work, a nudge might do the trick. NASA and ESA plan to study this with a mission called the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA), which will slam a satellite into an asteroid in 2020.

If we don’t have 50 years or a fast enough battering ram, we might need to break up an asteroid instead. Catherine Plesko of Los Alamos National Laboratory uses supercomputers to study how to break up asteroids using nuclear explosions and “kinetic impactors,” essentially giant space cannonballs.

“Cannonball technology is actually very good technology, because you’re intercepting the object at very high speed, so it ends up being more effective than conventional high explosives,” Plesko said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December. “If you really need a lot of energy, though, a nuclear burst is the way to get the largest amount of energy out to the object in the smallest possible container.”

Her simulations include equations that describe how fluids flow; the boiling and melting points of rocks depending on their densities; how light and energy propagates; and other physics. Then she can slip in a model for a given asteroid, and see how it responds to a cannonball.

If Earth decides to nuke it instead, the blast wouldn’t have to blow up the asteroid from within. The plan would entail launching a rocket with the bomb as its payload (a risky prospect, should it blow up on the launchpad) and aiming right for the asteroid. Exploding the bomb at the asteroid’s surface could disrupt its interior enough to break it apart, shifting its course and limiting the threat to Earth.

“For nuclear deflection, it really is the best idea to do an intensive load of these calculations before we even need to contemplate doing anything real,” Plesko says.

If we do need to do something real, it won’t happen overnight. It takes at least five years to design, build and launch a spacecraft that can deflect or destroy an asteroid or comet, according to astronomer Joseph Nuth of Goddard. He says humans would be wise to build a spacecraft now, and ideally two: an observer that could be quickly dispatched to learn more about the asteroid, and an interceptor that could deflect it.

“If we build it now on a normal schedule, and put that interceptor into storage, we can launch it in less than a year,” he explained at the AGU meeting. “This could mitigate the possibility of a sneaky asteroid coming in from a place that’s hard to observe, like toward the sun.” (The Chelyabinsk meteor was one such asteroid.)

No space agency has a deflector mission yet, but scientists know a lot more today than they did even 15 years ago, Bottke says.

“There was a time where we didn’t have a program to look for objects, and it was done privately. You had guys like [astronomer Eugene] Shoemaker driving out every month to Palomar Observatory to look for them,” Bottke says. “Now we have $50 million annually to look for them. Now we’re getting serious science missions to look at these.”

Bottke and others say the increased awareness of asteroid threats has also been a boon for science, and for the people who study asteroids not only as harbingers of doom, but as messengers from Earth’s creation.

“The probability that any large asteroid is going to hit is in the near future is pretty low,” Bottke says. “So I tend to focus on the more uplifting parts of asteroids.”

Source www.nbcnews.com

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25-01-2018 om 23:32 geschreven door peter  

ALIEN LIFE: WEIRD 'BIOSIGNATURES' HELP SCIENTISTS HUNT FOR EXTRATERRESTRIALS

25-01-2018 om 23:17 geschreven door peter  

"Mordor Under the Sea" Images Would Terrify Even Sauron

The submarine volcanic wasteland exists off the coast of Australia.

By Peter Hess

We all know Mordor, the volcano-peppered wasteland where Sauron dwells in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is a fantasy land, right? … Right? Don’t be so sure. As fortune would have it, geologists have discovered a landscape that bears an uncanny resemblance to Mordor — under the ocean.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

25-01-2018 om 22:36 geschreven door peter