22-04-2018 om 21:05 geschreven door peter  

22-04-2018 om 21:01 geschreven door peter  

A photographer decided to go out and do some sky watching on April 18, 2018 and was hoping to capture something strange and out of the ordinary.

He was scanning the sky looking east when he spotted something moving in his direction.

He couldn't make it out at first but as soon as it got a bit closer he zoomed in with his Nikon P900 camera and he could clearly see that it was in fact a rectangular shaped flying object.

The rectangular shaped object was very high up in the sky and was directly above the town center.

The photographer quickly took several photographs and watched as the UFO then flew off at incredible speed heading north whereby he lost sight of it. Mufon case 91544.

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.be/ }

22-04-2018 om 20:52 geschreven door peter  

White UFO Disk Hovering Over Construction Site In Virginia In March 15, 2018, Photos, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 15, 2018
Location of sighting: Ashburn, Virginia, USA
Source: MUFON #91551
Source photo: 

https://www.mufoncms.com/files_jeud8334j/91551_submitter_file1__20180315094318.jpg

This UFO was reported just a few days ago. It was seen over a construction site and it looks as if some of the workers were looking at it. The white UFO has taken on the appearance of a cloud to hide itself, but not very well. You can even see that there are window like openings around the edges of the craft. Remarkable report. 
Scott C. Waring

Eyewitness states: 

Was taking pictures of work site caught UFO and frame didn't see until after the fact.

Below is the photo put into Negative format for a different perspective of its details. 

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

22-04-2018 om 20:42 geschreven door peter  

US Government Accidentally Posts Records on “Psycho-Electronic Weapons” And “Remote Mind Control”

Is this that moment when a Conspiracy theory turns into reality?

According to reports, documents detailing Psycho-Electronic Weapons” and “Remote Mind Control” were accidentally sent to a journalist.

It’s not a secret that various US government agencies keep all kinds of secrets, but only a true conspiracy theorist would suspect that “psycho-electronic weapons” is one of them.

The info was revealed in ‘secret’ documents sent “by accident” to MuckRock, a news agency that specializes in processing Freedom of Information requests (FOIA), a law that gives citizens the right to access federal government information.

It all started when journalist Curtis Waltman wrote to the Washington State Fusion Center (WSFC)—a state security agency responsible for processing data on terrorism and extremis—requesting information about Antifa (the anti-fascist movement) and white supremacist groups.

While he got the documents he was looking for; he also received a strange zip file entitled “EM Effects on the human body.”

Once he extracted the files, he found the following intel:

The documents sent by accident apparently mention telepathy, dream control, hallucinations, remote mind control, and remote mapping of the brain.

Image Credit: Muckrock

The documents, which were apparently sent by accident offer a number of illustrations that show different devices and techniques that aim to manipulate the human mind. The file also features details about weapons that use electromagnetic force to induce intense pain in certain individuals.

Some of the images from the zip file appear to be part of an article published in 1992 in the Australian magazine Nexus, which speaks of a lawsuit by a John St. Clair Akewi against the NSA (National Security Agency).

Aweki claimed that the NSA had “the ability to covertly murder US citizens and conduct psychological control operations to cause certain individuals to be diagnosed as insane.”

What a conspiracy right?

The news magazine focuses on inexplicable facts, conspiracy theories, alternative medicine and other topics.

The documents refer to a number of devices suitable for remote mind control, including cell phones.

Image Credit: Muckrock.

According to the editors of the magazine, they tried to cover the case in 1996 but did not manage to provide the protagonist with more details:

“We called Mr. Akewi to follow up on the development of his demand, but he told us firmly and kindly that he could not talk about anything that had to do with the case over the phone and hung up.”

It is widely accepted that the USA and other world powers have experimented with the range of possibilities offered by mind control, but the documents leaked here do not seem official.

Talk about “Mind Control.”

Image Credit: Muckrock

However, they are another overwhelming proof of the great interest of the US government in the powers of the mind and their use as a tool for geopolitical and militaristic purposes.

Waltman has said he has no idea why that compressed file was included in what was sent to him.

According to reports, the WSFC has yet to respond on the matter.

As noted by Muckrock, it remains a mystery as to why or how the documents were sent to them: “It could have been meant for another release, it could have been gathered for an upcoming WSFC report, or it could even be from the personal files of an intelligence officer that somehow got mixed up in the release.”

Featured image credit: Muckrock

Source: Washington State Fusion Center accidentally releases records on remote mind control

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

22-04-2018 om 01:38 geschreven door peter  

Giant Impact May Have Created Mars' Moons

22-04-2018 om 01:29 geschreven door peter  

US Military's Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Spotted by Satellite Trackers

22-04-2018 om 01:17 geschreven door peter  

'UFOs are real’ Ex Air Force pilot makes bombshell claim after chasing ‘8000mph’ craft

A RETIRED Air Force officer claims the UK government is hiding proof of extraterrestrial life and has spilled the beans on his own encounter.

22-04-2018 om 01:00 geschreven door peter  

History’s Most Infamous UFO Sightings

UFOs aren’t a new phenomenon. In fact, humans have been describing unidentified flying objects for millennia, with depictions of disk-like objects and unusual atmospheric objects found in the art and literature of ancient civilizations from the Sumerians and the Egyptians to the Greeks and Romans.

But the modern era of UFOs took off in the middle of the 20th century, right around the time rockets and high-tech aircraft were being devised, often in secret. Coincidence? Paranoia? Perhaps. In any event, these seven UFO sightings certainly occurred, but it’s up to you to decide what explanation you’ll believe in.

1. Kenneth Arnold, 1947

The origin of today’s fascination can be traced back to civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold. While flying his small aircraft near Washington’s Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947, Arnold claimed to have seen nine blue, glowing objects flying fast—at an estimated 1700 mph—in a “V” formation. He first believed the objects to be some sort of new military aircraft (this was, after all, just two years after WWII and the first year of the Cold War), but the military confirmed that there were no tests being conducted near Mount Rainier that day. When he described their motion as similar to “a saucer if you skip it across water,” the media coined the now-ubiquitous phrase “flying saucer.” Soon, other reports of a group of nine UFOs cropped up across the region, including sightings by a prospector on Mount Adams and the crew of a commercial flight in Idaho. The government never had a true explanation for the sightings—it simply claimed that Arnold had seen a mirage or was hallucinating. But UFO mania had set in, and just a few weeks later, the infamous Roswell sighting would perpetuate the obsession.

2. Roswell, 1947

It’s the mother of all UFO sightings, but no object was actually observed flying in the Roswell incident. In the summer of 1947, rancher William “Mac” Brazel discovered mysterious debris in one of his New Mexico pastures, including metallic rods, chunks of plastic and unusual, papery scraps. When Brazel reported the wreckage, soldiers from nearby Roswell Army Air Force Base were called in to retrieve the materials.News headlines claimed that a “flying saucer” crashed in Roswell, but military officials purported that it was only a downed weather balloon. Ever since, conspiracy theorists have been hard at work trying to prove the wreckage was extraterrestrial, with one gentleman, Ray Santilli, going as far as releasing a video in 1995 of an alien dissection purported to have taken place after the incident. (Santilli would admit in 2006 that it was a staged film, but he maintained that it was based off of actual footage.)

As it turns out, the government was indeed covering something up—but it wasn’t aliens. The crashed weather balloon was, in fact, part of a top-secret military endeavor called Project Mogul, which launched high-altitude balloons carrying equipment used to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The Air Force provided plenty of proof in a 231-page report released in 1997 called “Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash.” Though the mystery has been thoroughly debunked, interest in the case has only grown, and Roswell’s tourism is heavily based around its famous “UFO sighting.” It’s home to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, a spaceship-shaped McDonald’s and an annual UFO festival, held each summer.

3. Lubbock Lights, 1951

On the evening of August 25, 1951, three science professors from Texas Tech were enjoying an evening outdoors in Lubbock, when they looked up and saw a semicircle of lights flying above them at a high speed. Over the next few days, dozens of reports flooded in from across town—Texas Tech freshman Carl Hart Jr., even snapped photos of the phenomenon, which were published in newspapers across the country and Life magazine. Project Blue Book investigated the events, and their official conclusion was that the lights were birds that reflected the luminescence from Lubbock’s new streetlamps. Many people who saw the lights, however, refuse to accept this explanation, arguing that the lights were flying too fast.

4. Levelland, 1957

Have you ever seen the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind? There’s a famous scene where a UFO makes the electronics in a car go haywire. As it so happens, that’s not just a Hollywood invention for the silver screen—there’s real-life precedence. In 1957, dozens of citizens of Levelland, Texas, individually reported seeing a rocket or strange lights that interfered with their vehicles: Engines died, lights cut out. Though the police initially thought the reports were a hoax, they, too, saw the mysterious lights, as they investigated the situation.Project Blue Book, a UFO research group created by the Air Force, was assigned to investigate the case. Their findings? It was an electrical storm and ball lightning that caused the lights and the mechanical malfunctions, despite the fact that there were no reported thunderstorms in the area that night.

5. Tehran, 1976

The September 19, 1976, incident in Tehran, Iran, started much like many others, with phone calls from concerned citizens reporting a bright light in the sky. An F-4 fighter jet was set out to investigate, but as it neared the object, its instruments blacked out, forcing the pilot to return to base. A second F-4 took its place, and as it neared the unusual light, it achieved radar lock. But then, according to the pilot, the UFO released a glowing object—the pilot assumed it to be some sort of missile headed straight for him. As he prepared to fight back, the pilot experienced malfunctions with his instruments, and he witnessed another bright object released from the UFO that headed straight toward the ground. He safely returned to base, despite the faulty equipment.After the incident, Iran contacted the United States to aid them in an investigation. An unclassified memo by U.S. Air Force section chief Lieutenant Colonel Olin Mooy detailed the events of the night: There are explanations for nearly all of them.

First, the bright light seen by civilians (and possibly the pilots) might have been Jupiter, which was visible in the sky that night. Second, as author Brian Dunning notes in a podcast, the second F-4 jet had a long history of electrical problems, meaning that the instrumentation might have failed regardless of a UFO situation. It also could explain the radar lock—it might simply have been a malfunction. The first F-4, reports Dunning, was never turned in for maintenance following the incident, so there’s no official indication that its instrumentation failed. And finally, as for the “alien missiles,” there was a meteor shower that night, which could easily account for the sightings.

6. Rendlesham Forest, 1980

In December 1980, U.S. Air Force members stationed at two British Royal Air Force bases, Woodbridge and Bentwaters, reported seeing strange, colorful lights above Rendlesham Forest, about 100 miles northeast of London. One man who entered the forest to investigate claimed to have discovered some sort of spacecraft there, and the next day, others confirmed damage to nearby trees and a higher-than-normal level of radiation at the site.Several days later, more sightings were reported. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt recorded his observations on an audio tape as he watched the lights, and while not definitive proof, theorists consider this the strongest evidence of the events. But the UK’s Ministry of Defence, which oversaw reports of UFO incidents until the early 2000s, did not find any credible threat to the nation, and thus did not pursue investigations further. As at Roswell, UFO tourism is prevalent in Rendlesham Forest, and there’s even an official Rendlesham UFO trail that visitors can hike, off of which is a model of the reported spacecraft.

7. The Belgium Wave, 1989-90

At the end of November 1989, citizens of Belgium reported seeing a large, triangular UFO hovering in the sky. But other than these visual sightings, no evidence of the UFO’s existence was to be found—for now. A few months later, in March 1990, new sightings of multiple objects were reported, which were confirmed by two military ground radar stations. Two F-16 fighter jets were sent out to investigate the anomalies, and though the pilots could not see anything visually, they were able to lock onto their targets with radar. But the UFOs moved so fast that the pilots ended up losing them. Some 13,500 people are estimated to have witnessed the incident, making it one of the most widely experienced UFO sightings of the modern era.The Belgian Air Force had no logical explanation for the activity, but it acknowledged that an unknown activity had taken place in the air. The Belgians reached out to the UK’s Ministry of Defence to investigate further, but once they determined that the incident was not a hostile or aggressive one, they stopped the investigation.

21-04-2018 om 13:05 geschreven door peter  

This NASA Photo Proves That The Moon Landing Was Fake, Conspiracy Theorist Says

By Aaron Mamiit Tech Times

An archived NASA photo allegedly shows evidence that the moon landing was fake. According to a conspiracy theorist, the boulders in the background are not simple rocks but are actually something else.

( NASA )

An archived NASA photo provides further proof to the allegations that the moon landing was fake, according to a conspiracy theorist.

There is a mountain of evidence that the moon landing really happened, but there remains a group of people who believe that it was all a hoax. After looking at the NASA photo, which side will you be on?

NASA Photo Allegedly Shows Structure On The Moon

The image in question shows John W. Young, the commander of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, collecting samples from the moon's surface. The description of the photo says that the Lunar Roving Vehicle was parked among "the field of large boulders in the background."

However, according to a video uploaded on the YouTube channel UFOmania, the boulders shown in the image are not simple rocks but rather "habitat building, spaceship, and extra personnel."

There are two suggestions on what really happened with the moon landing. The first suggestion is that the whole thing was staged, with the images and videos taken in a studio that was made to look like the moon. Pursuing this thought, the structure in the background of the image may have been part of the studio where the moon landing was filmed.

The second suggestion, meanwhile, is more sinister. Some believe that the Apollo 16 astronauts discovered evidence of alien life on the moon, and the images and videos were mostly edited to remove all instances showing proof of it. The image may then be thought of showing one of these alien structures.

Most commenters on the YouTube video, however, remain adamant that the things in the background of the image are really just rocks. Conspiracy theorists, however, will keep saying otherwise, and it is up to you to decide what to believe.

Man On The Moon

NASA recently released a 4K video showing the surface of the moon taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The work of the spacecraft will help start plans for manned missions to the moon in the future.

President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, confirmed that the Russian space program is planning to send astronauts to the moon in a modern space race that also involves the United States and Japan. Russia is planning to first establish a space station on the lunar orbit and then place modules on the moon itself.

Whether the astronauts will find evidence of alien life on the moon remains unclear. However, something that they will surely find there is space junk, as 400,000 pounds of garbage have been left on the moon by previous missions.

{ http://www.techtimes.com/ } 

21-04-2018 om 12:46 geschreven door peter  

21-04-2018 om 12:35 geschreven door peter  

When we think about the reality of meeting an extraterrestrial race, we often think about the difficulty, and sometimes supposed impossibility, of communicating or even recognizing that communication was being attempted. We wonder, also, how we could recognize a culture completely outside of our frames of reference. Could we even identify alien artwork, let alone appreciate it? Could we recognize alien music, if they indeed had a concept of music? A paper published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests that humans would be able to recognize and appreciate alien music due to our ability to process language, provided that it follows a couple of rules, and suggests that we might have an easier time understanding a completely alien culture than we’ve previously thought.

OK, music nerd time. Sorry. The rules in question aren’t specifically musical rules, or even specific grammatical rules, but sort of “meta rules” of structure and coherence. Alien musicwould need to be built on local and non-local dependencies. Dependencies, in terms of music, are the commonalities that make a song sound like one coherent piece. A local dependency binds two adjacent things together—something like a drum pattern repeating every four bars—and non-local dependencies bind non-adjacent things together. Non-local dependencies can be understood in terms of pop-music: the classic verse-chorus structure. The two verses are non-adjacent, because they’re separated by a chorus, but the second verse follows a rule set up by the first. This is used to create anticipation, resolution, emotional resonance and all the things that make music awesome. It’s not confined to pop-music at all, you’ll find local and non-local dependencies throughout all human music from classical, to punk rock, to non-western music like that from India or the Arab peninsula, that use completely different scales and rhythmic figures,  but pop’s simplicity makes it a very easy example.

Right, got that out of my system. That explanation is important, though. Essentially, as long as alien music had some sort of internal structure, we’d be able to recognize it even if it followed exactly zero musical rules that our culture had prepared us for.

Music is just emotional math, and instruments are human-powered calculators.

To figure this out, Vincent Cheung and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences wrote some “alien” music of their own. Their description of the alien music is “randomly generated combinations of tone-triplets that were combined in a palindrome-like manner.” They brought in musicians of different levels of expertise and played for them their “alien music,” in a composition alongside random sequences with no internal grammatical rules. The musicians were tasked with determining which sequences followed randomly generated grammatical rules local dependencies, and which sequences had no grammatical rules. The team found that they could, and that they could identify non-local dependencies within the compositions as well.

Sequences of repeating electronic tones that only follow a weird internal logic? Now you’re speaking my language.

Repeating the tests with the musicians in an MRI machine, the team found something surprising. An area of the brain on the right hemisphere was lighting up, which mirrored “Broca’s area.” Broca’s area—named for anatomist Paul Broca—is part of the cerebral cortex on the left side of the brain and it’s responsible for our understanding of dependencies in language. It’s what flips out when you hear grammatical mistakes in language. What the researchers found is that we have a twin area on the other side of the brain that understands grammar in more ethereal and subjective things like music. It seems we might be hard-wired to understand structure itself, regardless of our cultural frameworks.

There are so many works of fiction that deal with the obvious communication and cultural barriers that would be between us and any alien species. The 2016 film Arrival, and the short story it was based on, dealt with that question and cast a linguist as the hero figure who deciphers an alien language that doesn’t even conform to our sense of time. Close Encounters of the Third Kind involved communication through music specifically. It seems reasonable to imagine that any species that can travel through space would base their culture and communication on some internal set of rules, even if it doesn’t resemble ours in the slightest. This research could suggest that we’d be able to easily recognize that there are rules, not just chaos, which would eliminate the very first barrier to understanding.

Of course, we already know what alien music sounds like.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

21-04-2018 om 12:23 geschreven door peter  

Let’s get a few things out of the way right up front. The Exploding Ants would be a great name for a band. The Suicidal Exploding Ants would be even better. A collection of exploding ants in one of those plastic ant farms would provide some people with hours of sadistic fun, even if they’re not using recreational mood enhancers. And, for those who are wondering, exploding ants are real but exceedingly rare creatures and researchers in Borneo have just discovered a new species of them living in treetops. Depending on how big they are, the people of Borneo probably appreciate them staying up there.

According to a new study published in ZooKeys, Colobopsis explodens is the latest entry on the list of 15 known species of exploding ants, which were first discovered in 1916, live (and apparently die violently) mainly in the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia, and haven’t added a new name to the species catalogue since 1935. That changed recently when researchers from the Natural History Museum Vienna, Technical University Vienna and other institutions traveled to Borneo, Thailand, and Malaysia to survey ants. (How did they explain to their parents that their goal in life was to climb trees in jungles to count ants? Asking for a friend.)

One, two, three … is that one big ant or two mating?

What they found high in the trees were bloated ants which, when confronted with dangers like predators or scientists, self-erupted and sprayed a sticky yellow and highly toxic goo everywhere as their final dying act for the ant collective. Myrmecologists (people who study ants) have a less descriptive name for this suicidal behavior – autothysis – and report seeing it in a few species of termites, but nothing like the horror movie plot-ish display these ants put on in Borneo.

The team confirmed that not all of the ants had the ability to become tiny suicide bombers, finding that only a minor class of workers were exploders. They’re born with large, poison-filled glands and extra-strong abdominal muscles that contract under stress, bursting the glands to release the poison … killing the brave exploding ant (although the whole action is probably reflexive and involuntary) and either killing the predator or wounding it enough that in never visits that treetop again. The chemical in the sticky goo is an irritant and corrosive – entangling, immobilizing and painfully torturing the invader. Is this going to make a great movie or what? (A short documentary video on the exploding ants can be seen here.)

Which ones are the exploders?

If that’s not enough, the other castes in the colony have their own non-exploding quirks. There are so-called “doorkeepers” which have huge heads that they use to block the entrance to the ant nest. For the first time ever, the researchers witnessed a male and female ant mating in flight – yes, they can fly too and do it while airborne, putting them in an ant version of the mile high club. And, because no other species want to mess with them, they feast on whatever they want, including fruit, other insects and fish.

Now, all we need is for some of these Colobopsis explodens to be exposed to a high level of radiation – maybe a disabled space station loaded with toxic fuel crashes in the jungle – and we’ve got a reason for them to grow to monstrous sizes and destroy entire cities until a character played by Chris Pratt figures out how to build a giant magnifying glass to fry them into extinction. Revenge of the Ant Farm – coming soon to a theater near you.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

21-04-2018 om 12:11 geschreven door peter  

Unknown satellites in the solar system. Are they extraterrestrial? Videos.

In our solar system there are many objects such as asteroids, comets or planets that astronomers have documented and described in detail. Of course, there are also satellites and satellites made by humans or larger space debris, such as burned rocket launchers.

In space, however, there are objects that astronomers can not identify, and some even consider them non-Earth satellites. What are they actually?

1. We do not know the celestial body
Astronomers in space are constantly searching for unknown asteroids that could also endanger our planet Earth. That is why, in 1999, in the American state of New Mexico, the Linear Satellite project was created, where scientists searched by means of an automatic telescope to search for unknown or unidentified asteroids.

Over the course of this project, they discovered an unknown body with a diameter of 30 to 50 meters, which runs around the Sun on a nearly circular path with a circulation period of 1.09 years. This object, which was named 1999 CG9, is about 158 ​​million kilometers from the Sun, about 9 million kilometers away from our planet Earth. The greatest mystery for astronomers is its atypical orbit, which is almost circular. All other celestial bodies move along the elliptical path.

Brain Marsden of the Harward Smithsonian Center is convinced that due to the size of the object, it can not be the burning degree of a carrier rocket. Therefore, he believes that this object could come from a moon that has a small gravitational force when it was thrown into space in the event of a larger meteorite.

However, a detailed analysis of the composition of the 1999 CG9 satellite would be required to confirm this assumption. Some scientists, however, are skeptical about this, because it would be a really good piece of the Moon that was thrown into the universe, and its circular path, which scientists have not explained yet.

2. Unknown Celestial Body
Even in November 1991, however, astronomers from the Kitt Peak Observatory in the US discovered a body that behaved similarly to the 1999 CG9 object. The Sky & Telescope magazine, which has been named the 1991 VG even referred to as a “true UFO,” because its orbit almost exactly copies the orbit of our blue planet, and it also features light effects.

The biggest mystery for astronomers is the fact that the 1991 VG does not reflect the radar waves at all, which is quite a matter of fact for other cosmic bodies. Therefore, the overwhelming majority of scientists consider the possibility that the natural body would behave as absolutely excluded.

Some scientists think it could be the remains of an earlier probe or rocket, but later it was found that such a orbit does not correspond to the calculated orbit of missiles and satellites so far. At the beginning of December 1991, this body traveled only 450,000 kilometers from the Earth

There is the possibility that this mysterious object is in fact some non-Earth probe or satellite, as was said by Australian astronomer Duncan Steel of the University of Adelaide. Later, however, he took his words back and said he was not convinced that this body was of extraterrestrial origin.

In the summer of 2017, the 1991 VG spacecraft can be seen from the southern hemisphere, and astronomers believe they can identify the satellite that is copying the Earth’s orbit. It will be just one of the burnt levels of the carrier rocket than most scientists think, or it may be a non-Earth probe, which does not exclude British astronomer Duncan Forgan. Let’s surprise you.

NOSTRADAMUS IS QUOTED AS SAYING MANKIND WOULD DISCOVER A MACHINE IN SPACE THAT WAS SENT TO US BY THE WATCHERS! IN 2018-2019!

{ https://dailymysteries.com/ }

21-04-2018 om 01:53 geschreven door peter  

Hypersaline lakes could help search for extraterrestrial life

There are roughly 400 known subglacial lakes around the world.

{ https://thespacereporter.com/ }

21-04-2018 om 01:38 geschreven door peter  

In a series of papers, Professor Loeb and Michael Hippke indicate that conventional rockets would have a hard time escaping from certain kinds of extra-solar planets.

Credit: NASA/Tim Pyle

THE CHALLENGES OF AN ALIEN SPACEFLIGHT PROGRAM: ESCAPING SUPER EARTHS AND RED DWARF STARS

 

by Matt Williams

Since the beginning of the Space Age, humans have relied on chemical rockets to get into space. While this method is certainly effective, it is also very expensive and requires a considerable amount of resources. As we look to more efficient means of getting out into space, one has to wonder if similarly-advanced species on other planets (where conditions would be different) would rely on similar methods.

Harvard Professor Abraham Loeb and Michael Hippke, an independent researcher affiliated with the Sonneberg Observatory, both addressed this question in two recently–released papers. Whereas Prof. Loeb looks at the challenges extra-terrestrials would face launching rockets from Proxima b, Hippke considers whether aliens living on a Super-Earth would be able to get into space.

The papers, tiled “Interstellar Escape from Proxima b is Barely Possible with Chemical Rockets” and “Spaceflight from Super-Earths is difficult” recently appeared online, and were authored by Prof. Loeb and Hippke, respectively. Whereas Loeb addresses the challenges of chemical rockets escaping Proxima b, Hippke considers whether or not the same rockets would able to achieve escape velocity at all.

Artist’s impression of Proxima b, which was discovered using the Radial Velocity method.

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

For the sake of his study, Loeb considered how we humans are fortunate enough to live on a planet that is well-suited for space launches. Essentially, if a rocket is to escape from the Earth’s surface and reach space, it needs to achieve an escape velocity of 11.186 km/s (40,270 km/h; 25,020 mph). Similarly, the escape velocity needed to get away from the location of the Earth around the Sun is about 42 km/s (151,200 km/h; 93,951 mph).

As Prof. Loeb told Universe Today via email:

“Chemical propulsion requires a fuel mass that grows exponentially with terminal speed. By a fortunate coincidence the escape speed from the orbit of the Earth around the Sun is at the limit of attainable speed by chemical rockets. But the habitable zone around fainter stars is closer in, making it much more challenging for chemical rockets to escape from the deeper gravitational pit there.”

As Loeb indicates in his essay, the escape speed scales as the square root of the stellar mass over the distance from the star, which implies that the escape speed from the habitable zone scales inversely with stellar mass to the power of one quarter. For planets like Earth, orbiting within the habitable zone of a G-type (yellow dwarf) star like our Sun, this works out quite while.

This infographic compares the orbit of the planet around Proxima Centauri (Proxima b) with the same region of the Solar System.

Credit: Pale Red Dot

Unfortunately, this does not work well for terrestrial planets that orbit lower-mass M-type (red dwarf) stars. These stars are the most common type in the Universe, accounting for 75% of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. In addition, recent exoplanet surveys have discovered a plethora of rocky planets orbiting red dwarf stars systems, with some scientists venturing that they are the most likely place to find potentially-habitable rocky planets.

Using the nearest star to our own as an example (Proxima Centauri), Loeb explains how a rocket using chemical propellant would have a much harder time achieving escape velocity from a planet located within it’s habitable zone.

“The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is an example for a faint star with only 12% of the mass of the Sun,” he said. “A couple of years ago, it was discovered that this star has an Earth-size planet, Proxima b, in its habitable zone, which is 20 times closer than the separation of the Earth from the Sun. At that location, the escape speed is 50% larger than from the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. A civilization on Proxima b will find it difficult to escape from their location to interstellar space with chemical rockets.”

Hippke’s paper, on the other hand, begins by considering that Earth may in fact not be the most habitable type of planet in our Universe. For instance, planets that are more massive than Earth would have higher surface gravity, which means they would be able to hold onto a thicker atmosphere, which would provide greater shielding against harmful cosmic rays and solar radiation.

Artists impression of a Super-Earth, a class of planet that has many times the mass of Earth, but less than a Uranus or Neptune-sized planet.

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

In addition, a planet with higher gravity would have a flatter topography, resulting in archipelagos instead of continents and shallower oceans – an ideal situation where biodiversity is concerned. However, when it comes to rocket launches, increased surface gravity would also mean a higher escape velocity. As Hippke indicated in his study:

“Rockets suffer from the Tsiolkovsky (1903) equation : if a rocket carries its own fuel, the ratio of total rocket mass versus final velocity is an exponential function, making high speeds (or heavy payloads) increasingly expensive.”

For comparison, Hippke uses Kepler-20 b, a Super-Earth located 950 light years away that is 1.6 times Earth’s radius and 9.7 times it mass. Whereas escape velocity from Earth is roughly 11 km/s, a rocket attempting to leave a Super-Earth similar to Kepler-20 b would need to achieve an escape velocity of ~27.1 km/s. As a result, a single-stage rocket on Kepler-20 b would have to burn 104 times as much fuel as a rocket on Earth to get into orbit.

To put it into perspective, Hippke considers specific payloads being launched from Earth. “To lift a more useful payload of 6.2 t as required for the James Webb Space Telescope on Kepler-20 b, the fuel mass would increase to 55,000 t, about the mass of the largest ocean battleships,” he writes. “For a classical Apollo moon mission (45 t), the rocket would need to be considerably larger, ~400,000 t.”

Project Starshot, an initiative sponsored by the Breakthrough Foundation, is intended to be humanity’s first interstellar voyage.

Credit: breakthroughinitiatives.org

While Hippke’s analysis concludes that chemical rockets would still allow for escape velocities on Super-Earths up to 10 Earth masses, the amount of propellant needed makes this method impractical. As Hippke pointed out, this could have a serious effect on an alien civilization’s development.

“I am surprised to see how close we as humans are to end up on a planet which is still reasonably lightweight to conduct space flight,” he said. “Other civilizations, if they exist, might not be as lucky. On more massive planets, space flight would be exponentially more expensive. Such civilizations would not have satellite TV, a moon mission, or a Hubble Space Telescope. This should alter their way of development in certain ways we can now analyze in more detail.”

Both of these papers present some clear implications when it comes to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). For starters, it means that civilizations on planets that orbit red dwarf stars or Super-Earths are less likely to be space-faring, which would make detecting them more difficult. It also indicates that when it comes to the kinds of propulsion humanity is familiar with, we may be in the minority.

“This above results imply that chemical propulsion has a limited utility, so it would make sense to search for signals associated with lightsails or nuclear engines, especially near dwarf stars,” said Loeb. “But there are also interesting implications for the future of our own civilization.”

Artist’s concept of a bimodal nuclear rocket making the journey to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations in the Solar System.

Credit: NASA

“One consequence of the paper is for space colonization and SETI,” added Hippke. “Civs from Super-Earths are much less likely to explore the stars. Instead, they would be (to some extent) “arrested” on their home planet, and e.g. make more use of lasers or radio telescopes for interstellar communication instead of sending probes or spaceships.”

However, both Loeb and Hippke also note that extra-terrestrial civilizations could address these challenges by adopting other methods of propulsion. In the end, chemical propulsion may be something that few technologically-advanced species would adopt because it is simply not practical for them. As Loeb explained:

“An advanced extraterrestrial civilization could use other propulsion methods, such as nuclear engines or lightsails which are not constrained by the same limitations as chemical propulsion and can reach speeds as high as a tenth of the speed of light. Our civilization is currently developing these alternative propulsion technologies but these efforts are still at their infancy.”

One such example is Breakthrough Starshot, which is currently being developed by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation (of which Loeb is the chair of the Advisory Committee). This initiative aims to use a laser-driven lightsail to accelerate a nanocraft up to speeds of 20% the speed of light, which will allow it to travel to Proxima Centauri in just 20 years time.

Artist’s impression of rocky exoplanets orbiting Gliese 832, a red dwarf star just 16 light-years from Earth.

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org).

Hippke similarly considers nuclear rockets as a viable possibility, since increased surface gravity would also mean that space elevators would be impractical. Loeb also indicated that the limitations imposed by planets around low mass stars could have repercussions for when humans try to colonize the known Universe:

“When the sun will heat up enough to boil all water off the face of the Earth, we could relocate to a new home by then. Some of the most desirable destinations would be systems of multiple planets around low mass stars, such as the nearby dwarf star TRAPPIST-1which weighs 9% of a solar mass and hosts seven Earth-size planets. Once we get to the habitable zone of TRAPPIST-1, however, there would be no rush to escape. Such stars burn hydrogen so slowly that they could keep us warm for ten trillion years, about a thousand times longer than the lifetime of the sun.”

But in the meantime, we can rest easy in the knowledge that we live on a habitable planet around a yellow dwarf star, which affords us not only life, but the ability to get out into space and explore. As always, when it comes to searching for signs of extra-terrestrial life in our Universe, we humans are forced to take the “low hanging fruit approach”.

Basically, the only planet we know of that supports life is Earth, and the only means of space exploration we know how to look for are the ones we ourselves have tried and tested. As a result, we are somewhat limited when it comes to looking for biosignatures (i.e. planets with liquid water, oxygen and nitrogen atmospheres, etc.) or technosignatures (i.e. radio transmissions, chemical rockets, etc.).

As our understanding of what conditions life can emerge under increases, and our own technology advances, we’ll have more to be on the lookout for. And hopefully, despite the additional challenges it may be facing, extra-terrestrial life will be looking for us!

• Professor Loeb’s essay was also recently published in Scientific American.
• Further Reading: arXiv, arXiv (2), Scientific American

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

21-04-2018 om 01:33 geschreven door peter  

What Is ‘Intelligent Life?’

21-04-2018 om 01:22 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Say an 8-Mile-Deep Italian Cave May Be the Key to Finding Life on Mars

Chris Mahon

 

Image credit: YouTube

• Trappist-1 Can't Support Life: Scientists Discover Exoplanets Have Too Much Water

{ https://www.outerplaces.com/ }

21-04-2018 om 01:11 geschreven door peter  

What if we’re not the first advanced civilization on Earth — How would we know?

BY MIHAI ANDREI

A new study raises an intriguing question: are we really the first ones to develop a civilization on Earth? Before you start thinking about aliens or wacky conspiracy theories, think about it this way: if another civilization had developed on the planet at some point in the geological past, how would we know about it? The new research explores that avenue; they call it “The Silurian hypothesis.”

Ancient life

Homo sapiens as we know it evolved some 315,000 years ago. You might think that’s a very long time and in one sense, it is. But at a geological scale, it’s nothing. Primates, as a group, emerged some 55 million years ago, while mammals came to be over 200 million years ago. Reptiles have been on this planet for more than 300 million years ago, and fish popped up more than 500 years ago. The history of life on Earth is so incredibly long it’s difficult to comprehend it at the human scale.

What we know about these ancient living creatures, we know through fossils. Sure, we complement findings with computer models and the ecological principles we’ve discovered, but fossils are still the pillar of our knowledge of ancient life. But it takes special conditions for a fossil to form, and the results we’ve discovered so far are few and far between compared to the mind-blowing diversity our planet has witnessed.

To make matters even worse, our planet is an active environment and tectonic movement (and other geological processes) can destroy fossils and other clues about ancient environments. So to sum it up, remnants of life are rare, and even those rare bits are often destroyed by the Earth’s geology. Now, think about it this way: wouldn’t the same thing happen to evidence of an ancient civilization?

Remnants of a civilization

If humanity went extinct tomorrow, what would be left of us? The buildings, roads, and all the infrastructure — for a while. They would be engulfed by vegetation in a few years, and almost everything would be destroyed in a few centuries. After a million years, you probably won’t see any evidence that mankind ever existed — at the surface, anyway.

A diligent scientist one million years in the future might be able to tell that a civilization once existed. He’d find isotopic evidence of atomic explosions, an unnatural rise in CO2 emissions, perhaps even some remnants of former structures — but all these have essentially happened in the past century. In their new study, Gavin A. Schmidt (a climatologist with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) and Adam Frank (an astronomer from the University of Rochester) address this conundrum: are we the first civilization on Earth, and what does this mean for finding life on other planets?

Based on recent astronomical findings, we know that there is a huge number of stars in the galaxy, many of them harboring stars in the habitable zone. The number of planets capable of hosting life might be very high, thus also increasing the chances of intelligent life forms emerging. Scientists are looking for extraterrestrial life more and more — but what about here on Earth, what if there is a previous civilization we’ve still yet to discover? What if we are the scientists million of years in the future, hunting for an ancient industrialized civilization, what would we find?

You’d start with the air, researchers write.

“Since the mid-18th Century, humans have released over 0.5 trillion tons of fossil carbon via the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, at a rate orders of magnitude faster than natural long-term sources or sinks. In addition, there has been widespread deforestation and addition of carbon dioxide into the air via biomass burning.”

You’d move on to geomorphological features, like increased rates of sediment flow in rivers and its deposition in coastal environments, as a result of agricultural processes, deforestation, and the digging of canals. Then, you’d move on to biology, looking for evidence of domesticated animals. But the biggest smoking gun would be synthetic materials. The presence of synthetic materials, plastics, and radioactive elements (caused by nuclear power or nuclear testing) could also leave a significant mark on the geological record, and isotopes could last for millions of years. Finally, you’d look for extinctions caused by the rise of said civilization.

“The clearest class of event with such similarities are the hyperthermals, most notably the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (56 Ma), but this also includes smaller hyperthermal events, ocean anoxic events in the Cretaceous and Jurassic, and significant (if less well characterized) events of the Paleozoic,” researchers continue.

A comparison between the Earth and Mars.

After tightening these constraints for Earth, they move on to what we might potentially see on other planets. Mars and Venus might have been habitable millions of years ago, and if we want to see if this was the case, we need to know what to look for.

“We note here that abundant evidence exists of surface water in ancient Martian climates (3.8 Ga), and speculation that early Venus (2 Ga to 0.7 Ga) was habitable (due to a dimmer sun and lower CO2 atmosphere) has been supported by recent modeling studies,” they state. “Conceivably, deep drilling operations could be carried out on either planet in future to assess their geological history. This would constrain consideration of what the fingerprint might be of life, and even organized civilization.”

Journal Reference: The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

21-04-2018 om 01:03 geschreven door peter  

The Megalithic Stones Of Carnac—An Ancient Cosmic Map?

The megalithic stones of Carnac are a set of stones intricately positioned in Brittany. It is the most extensive prehistoric monument in the world. This megalithic site is believed to have been erected during the Neolithic, probably around 3300 BCE, but some may date to as early as 4500 BCE.

Like extensive lines of penitents, the enigmatic stones of Carnac were positioned in a straight line across the rough territory of Brittany, keeping guard in front of the waters of the Bay of Biscay

Local tradition has yielded a number of interesting legends about the menhirs.

Although their presence and configuration are truly mysterious, the peasants of the region found a way to explain them. According to a deep-rooted belief, the megaliths are Roman soldiers petrified by God to protect Saint Cornelius, patron of Carnac.

Another one suggests that, at night, the stones come to life and advance towards the sea to bathe or to drink.

The famous neolithic menhirs near Carnac, Brittany, France.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

They have been credited with healing powers, and it was believed that they could provide fertility and help people who seek love.

The Stones of Carnac are not only one of the most extensive prehistoric monument in the world, they were seeming just as important when they were erected, and evidence of that is the number of stones that were present in the area.

According to experts, when the stones were erected, there were as many as 10 thousand.

Today, after thousands of years, only 3,000 remain, in four large groupings: Le Menéc, Kermario, Kerlescan and Le Petit Menéc.

Next to the village of Le Menéc is where the most numerous alignment begins.

There are 1,099 stones in eleven rows placed mimicking soldiers or schoolchildren, in order of height: the largest measure 3.7 meters and the smallest only 90 centimeters.

They were positioned facing northeast in gentle undulations along a slightly curved line.

The Kermario megaliths are larger, with megaliths exceeding 7 meters in height and decrease in size over an area of 1,200 kilometers.

The other two groupings are smaller, but Kerlescan differs by a square configuration of the 540 stones that compose it.

Kermario stone rows, Karnag, Morbihan, Brittany.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

A Snakeish megalithic monument

Jerome Penhouet proposed, in 1826, that the four alignments of Carnac were part of the body of a massive snake that was depicted on the lands of Brittany.

However, different eras produced different theories trying to explain the mystery behind the stones.

During the nineteenth century, it was suggested that these were places dedicated to the solar and lunar cult, while other authors thought that they were avenues that led to the temples that have now disappeared from sight.

Atlantean remains?

Hans Hirmenech suggested that the rows of menhirs were the tombs of Atlantean soldiers who had died during the Trojan War.

Also, James Fergusson proposed that the erection of these monuments should commemorate a sort of great battle that took place in ancient times.

Other scholars who studied the megalithic stones went further and proposed that they were true tombs and believed they found support for this reasoning in the meaning of the names of some places: in Breton, a language of Celtic origin, Kermario means “city of the dead”.

However, when formulating the last theory, it seems that exerts ignored the fact that the menhirs are much older than the appearance of the Celts in this region.

Cosmic map?

The first to allude to the “celestial map theory” of Carnac was André Cambry, who maintained that the stones of Carnac mimick the stars, the planets, and the zodiac.

After Chambry, other authors took up the idea and, in 1970, the English engineer Alexander Thom followed the footsteps of Gerald Hawkins in his studies on Stonehenge and applied them to Carnac.

According to Thom, the great fallen menhir of Locmariaquer was the center of an immense astronomical observatory capable of predicting eclipses.

Their measurements indicate that from this supermassive gigantic menhir it was possible to observe the eight extreme positions of the Moon.

He also proposed that the Carnac alignment were solar calculators, used to correct the irregularities observed in the movements of the Moon.

The immense fallen menhir of Locmariaquer, known as Er Grah (the Stone of the Fairies), measured more than 20 meters in height and is believed to have existed with a combination of other menhirs that are now gone. This massive menhir has an estimated weight of 280 tons.

It remains a profound mystery as to how ancient people managed to move this, and other menhirs to their current positions, without the use of advanced technology.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

21-04-2018 om 00:50 geschreven door peter