This Week's Top Space Stories!

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Photo Credit: Ben Smegelsky/NASA

Photo Credit: Starry Night software

Photo Credit: Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Defence

Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: iStock/Getty Images

5. Moon once had melted insides.

Long ago, the moon may have been home to a subsurface magma flow. In a new study, two researchers suggest that a gooey interior between the moon's crust and its core could have triggered the ancient moon's lunar magnetic field.

[Full Story: Gooey, Magma Ocean May Have Once Roiled Inside the Moon]

[See also: Mineral Found in Lunar Meteorite Hints at Hidden Moon Water]

Photo Credit: NASA

6. Galileo sees Ganymede glow.

Jupiter is home to the largest moon in the entire solar system, Ganymede. Jupiter gives off radiation, and scientists recently used data from the Galileo spacecraft to do a fresh take of how plasma moves between the moon and the gas giant, a phenomenon which causes bright auroras at Ganymede's polar caps. Scientists also want to use this data to learn more about the existence of subsurface oceans on Ganymede.

[Full Story: Decades-Old Data Shows Auroras on Jupiter's Moon Ganymede in a New Light]

Photo Credit: Blue Origin

7. New Shepard's first 2018 flight.

Private spaceflight company Blue Origin recently launched its New Shepard 2.0 passenger vehicle on a test flight over the skies of West Texas. The April 29 launch marked the second successful flight of the company's New Shepard program, and this trip carried a dummy and a few NASA science experiments onboard.

[Full Story: Blue Origin Launches New Shepard Space Capsule on Highest Test Flight Yet]

[See also: China Launches 5 Commercial Remote-Sensing Satellites Into Orbit]

Photo Credit: Engine House VFX

8. Helium found around an exoplanet.

Researchers recently spotted helium in the atmosphere of a scorching planet around a distant star. This is the first time the element has been observed around an exoplanet, and although early models predicted that helium should be among the most easily detectable elements in their atmospheres, it has remained unseen until now.

[Full Story: An Exoplanet First! Helium Spotted on Bizarre Comet-Like World]

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

9. Thermal shield gets a fracture.

The heat shield for NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission cracked during a weeklong test, according to the space agency. The damage occurred to the shield's outer edge, as the tests produced forces about 20 percent greater than what it would experience as the mission enters Mars' atmosphere. Fortunately, this incident won't seem to cause a launch date delay.

[Full Story: Heat Shield for NASA's Mars 2020 Rover Cracks During Test]

Photo Credit: CASIS

10. Cotton goes to space.

The Cotton Sustainability Challenge short-listed three new projects to operate on the International Space Station, with a goal of generating solutions for cotton production's high environmental cost. The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) announced the projects on Tuesday (April 24), which feature techniques like sequencing the genetic expression of cotton cultivars grown in the absence of gravity.

[Full Story: Softer Side of Space Science: Cotton Experiments Will Head to Orbit]

07-05-2018 om 01:07 geschreven door peter  

UFO spotted 'LEAVING Earth and heading for space' in astonishing video

BIZARRE footage has emerged that proves extraterrestrial life has already visited Earth, according to outrageous claims online.

By Callum Hoare 

Those videos shows several long cylinder-shaped objects captured across the night sky.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

06-05-2018 om 23:46 geschreven door peter  

Documents reveal how MoD played down ‘UFO thesis’ in X-Files study

Report was intended from outset to absolve MoD of responsibility for investigating sightings

Damien Gayle

 @damiengayle

{ https://www.theguardian.com/international }

06-05-2018 om 23:29 geschreven door peter  

InSight Lander: Probing the Martian Interior

06-05-2018 om 23:13 geschreven door peter  

SCI-FI MOVIES ARE WRONG ABOUT ALIENS, E.T. HUNTER JILL TARTER SAYS

By SPACE.com Staff

Despite what the movies tell us, any aliens that visit Earth probably won't want to enslave or vaporize us, veteran E.T. hunter Jill Tarter says.

Hostile aliens abound at the multiplex these days, terrorizing our planet in films such as "Battleship" and "Men in Black 3." But science fiction is probably far from reality in its depiction of Earth-contacting extraterrestrials, said Tarter, who announced Monday (May 22) that she's retiring after spending 35 years scanning the heavens for signals from intelligent life beyond Earth.

"If aliens were able to visit Earth, that would mean they would have technological capabilities sophisticated enough not to need slaves, food or other planets," Tarter, who is stepping down as director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., said in a statement.

Tarter's confidence in aliens' benign intentions puts her at odds with famed British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who has warned that extraterrestrial civilzations may venture our way to strip-mine our planet for resources.

"While Sir Stephen Hawking warned that alien life might try to conquer or colonize Earth, I respectfully disagree," Tarter said. "If aliens were to come here, it would be simply to explore. Considering the age of the universe, we probably wouldn’t be their first extraterrestrial encounter, either."

Tarter, other scientists and a variety of artists and entertainers will gather next month in Santa Clara, Calif., to discuss such issues in depth. SETICon II, held June 22-24, will explore humanity's place in the universe and the future of the search for life beyond Earth, conference organizers said.

While Tarter, 68, is retiring from her long-held research role at the SETI Institute, she will continue to devote herself to the search for E.T. She'll fundraise full-time for the Institute, which had to shut down its alien-hunting Allen Telescope Array for seven months last year because of a budget shortfall.

• Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 22:49 geschreven door peter  

MAN CAMPING IN THE DESERT AND FILMING BRIGHT UFO IN AREA 51

In this curious video, a man narrates an impressive scene. During registration, this citizen who for obvious reasons does not identify himself, seems really enthusiastic while filming a well-lit and isolated area between the mountains, which the author of the record claims to be the well-known Area 51.

Area 51, as it is called the US Army base located about 130 kilometers northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, where, according to many researchers and even ex-military, they claim to have reverse-engineered tests and experiments conducted through of UNV wreckage recovered by the military.

There are reports of many underground levels where humans and aliens would be working together. It is also speculated that there are several kilometer tunnels linking the base to many distinct US locations.

The recording man says he was camping some distance from Area 51 and a few days ago he spotted some lights in the sky that went up and down and flew around the area, lights like the ones he’s showing.

Satellite images of the supposed Area 51

Suddenly the object emanating a very intense blue light began to rise slowly as the witness narrated the scene. Quickly, the UFO moves to the right and fires to and to the left at an unimaginable speed for any terrestrial technology that has news. We know that nowadays, it is very easy to create fake videos that look realistic, it is often possible to perceive and others need a deeper analysis.

In the video in question, in a brief analysis, we can see that the landscape shown in the images really matches the location. The question of brightness and audio are things to watch out for. The way the light of the object hits the mountain and illuminates it subtly and the intonation in the cameraman’s voice helps to make the footage true.

The movement of the object in a perspective issue with regard to the environment is also faithful, since with the low resolution of the registry, it is even more difficult to accurately analyze and diagnose the authenticity, in addition to the absence of more data from the witness, but it has not nothing to contradict that this video can be real. What do you think?

Check below

Also published on Medium.

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 22:37 geschreven door peter  

THIRD SNOWY PYRAMID RECENTLY DISCOVERED IN ANTARCTICA COULD REWRITE HISTORY

Though not everyone is willing to admit it, our planet is full of relics and monuments that prove Earth was once populated by extremely advanced civilizations. Point in case: the third ice-covered pyramid discovered in Antarctica!

Ever since the service was released, Google Earth been a boon not just for conspiracy theorists but also for anyone looking to uncover clues about what lies hidden beyond sight. If you need a good vantage point, you need good eyes and altitude. Satellites have both.

The latest in a group of three snow-covered pyramids was recently discovered through Google Earth satellite imagery and in a few days, the finding has taken the alternative history communities by storm. Two of the pyramids can be found approximately 10 miles inland while the third rests near the coastline.

The implications of this discovery are complex and if accepted, it could turn the scientific world on its head. No history book ever mentioned an Antarctic civilization with the skills and technology necessary to erect enormous pyramids. There is one apparent reason behind this situation and by the looks of it, it would suggest tech-savvy civilizations existed on Earth a long time before our own emerged.

Antarctica is now a frozen wasteland but it wasn’t always like this. It got to its current position through plate tectonics, inching closer to the geographic South Pole year after year. Millions of years ago, Antarctica’s climate was much warmer because its position was closer to the equator. This is established fact backed up by several accepted discoveries, not some wild speculation.

Some years ago, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) uncovered evidence that the antarctic climate was much different in the distant past.

Go back 100 million years ago,” BAS’s Dr. Vanessa Bowman said “and Antarctica was covered in lush rainforests similar to those that exist in New Zealand today.”

Another expedition –led by NASA and involving 11 other scientific organizations– discovered out-of-place microbial life forms in the depths of Antarctica’s Lake Vida, trapped under a sheet of ice 65 feet thick. The microbial colonies had been prospering in isolation for millions of years and scientists believe they are the descendants of microorganisms that lived in a much warmer climate. Who knows what other enigmas lay buried in ice, hopelessly waiting to be revealed.

Even with today’s technology, building structures as massive as the pyramids of Antarctica would be nearly impossible. There are simply too many problems relating to manpower and the logistics required for such a project. If building these mysterious monuments were to be a viable venture, it must have taken place in the past, when Antarctica was a favorable place for human life.

And this opens up a king-sized can of worms. The continent was habitable only in the very distant past, but mainstream science says the wheel wasn’t invented until some 6,000 years ago. At the same time, anatomically-modern humans are said to have mastered fire only 125,000 years ago. So where do these controversial pyramids fit in? Are they evidence of an ancient advanced civilization or do we need to stretch our imagination even further and regard them as proof of time travel? The mind boggles when we remain attached to our outdated beliefs.

Proponents of alternative history and fans of the ancient aliens hypothesis have no problem in accepting the parallel reality generated by such discoveries. It’s not hard to see and accept that we aren’t the first and though it may seem this way, we probably won’t be the last.

Thousands of years after they were built, we are still fascinated by the Egyptian pyramids. The monuments left behind by their society have stood the test of time and in more than one way, they’ve granted their builders immortality. Keeping that in mind, what could be said about pyramids that are millions of years old? Does that put our own lives into perspective and make us see the bigger picture?

Or do we recoil in egotistic dismissal?

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 22:10 geschreven door peter  

THIRD SNOWY PYRAMID RECENTLY DISCOVERED IN ANTARCTICA COULD REWRITE HISTORY

Though not everyone is willing to admit it, our planet is full of relics and monuments that prove Earth was once populated by extremely advanced civilizations. Point in case: the third ice-covered pyramid discovered in Antarctica!

Ever since the service was released, Google Earth been a boon not just for conspiracy theorists but also for anyone looking to uncover clues about what lies hidden beyond sight. If you need a good vantage point, you need good eyes and altitude. Satellites have both.

The latest in a group of three snow-covered pyramids was recently discovered through Google Earth satellite imagery and in a few days, the finding has taken the alternative history communities by storm. Two of the pyramids can be found approximately 10 miles inland while the third rests near the coastline.

The implications of this discovery are complex and if accepted, it could turn the scientific world on its head. No history book ever mentioned an Antarctic civilization with the skills and technology necessary to erect enormous pyramids. There is one apparent reason behind this situation and by the looks of it, it would suggest tech-savvy civilizations existed on Earth a long time before our own emerged.

Antarctica is now a frozen wasteland but it wasn’t always like this. It got to its current position through plate tectonics, inching closer to the geographic South Pole year after year. Millions of years ago, Antarctica’s climate was much warmer because its position was closer to the equator. This is established fact backed up by several accepted discoveries, not some wild speculation.

Some years ago, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) uncovered evidence that the antarctic climate was much different in the distant past.

Go back 100 million years ago,” BAS’s Dr. Vanessa Bowman said “and Antarctica was covered in lush rainforests similar to those that exist in New Zealand today.”

Another expedition –led by NASA and involving 11 other scientific organizations– discovered out-of-place microbial life forms in the depths of Antarctica’s Lake Vida, trapped under a sheet of ice 65 feet thick. The microbial colonies had been prospering in isolation for millions of years and scientists believe they are the descendants of microorganisms that lived in a much warmer climate. Who knows what other enigmas lay buried in ice, hopelessly waiting to be revealed.

Even with today’s technology, building structures as massive as the pyramids of Antarctica would be nearly impossible. There are simply too many problems relating to manpower and the logistics required for such a project. If building these mysterious monuments were to be a viable venture, it must have taken place in the past, when Antarctica was a favorable place for human life.

And this opens up a king-sized can of worms. The continent was habitable only in the very distant past, but mainstream science says the wheel wasn’t invented until some 6,000 years ago. At the same time, anatomically-modern humans are said to have mastered fire only 125,000 years ago. So where do these controversial pyramids fit in? Are they evidence of an ancient advanced civilization or do we need to stretch our imagination even further and regard them as proof of time travel? The mind boggles when we remain attached to our outdated beliefs.

Proponents of alternative history and fans of the ancient aliens hypothesis have no problem in accepting the parallel reality generated by such discoveries. It’s not hard to see and accept that we aren’t the first and though it may seem this way, we probably won’t be the last.

Thousands of years after they were built, we are still fascinated by the Egyptian pyramids. The monuments left behind by their society have stood the test of time and in more than one way, they’ve granted their builders immortality. Keeping that in mind, what could be said about pyramids that are millions of years old? Does that put our own lives into perspective and make us see the bigger picture?

Or do we recoil in egotistic dismissal?

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 22:10 geschreven door peter  

This Map Lets You Travel Back In Time And See What Earth Looked Like 600 Million Years Ago

A stunning new interactive map lets you travel back in time and see how our planet’s continents have changed through more than 600 million years.

The ancient Earth Globe lets viewers appreciate how Earth’s continents have transformed while ocean levels advanced and receded through 600 million years of our planet’s history.

The stunning map was built using research gathered by Northern Arizona University. According to one of the interactive map’s creators, a former Google engineer, it shows how humans are ‘just a blip in history.’

The stunning map allows you to travel through 600 million years of our planet’s history. To understand what occurred at a certain time, the map features a small description of the period you are currently viewing.

For example, if we decide to see what the Earth looked like 600 million years ago, the ancient Earth Globe map tells us that we are looking at the Ediacaran Period. Life is evolving in the sea, and multicellular life is just beginning to emerge.

Earth 600 million years ago.

Image Credit: dinosaurpictures.org

In the menu, we can scroll through different ages. 560 million years ago, we see the Late Ediacaran. Life is evolving in the sea, and multicellular life is just beginning to emerge.

A mass extinction is about to take place, tells the map while we see an unrecognizable Earth.

500 million years ago we traveled to the Late Cambrian. The interactive map explains how the ocean is teeming with life following a dramatic expansion of animal diversity in the sea, known as the “Cambrian explosion.” The forms of some animals show ancestry to modern animals.

Traveling further in time, we decided to stop by and see how our planet looked like 430 million years ago, during the Silurian Period.

The interactive map tells us that a mass extinction took place, wiping out nearly half of marine invertebrate species. The first land plants emerge, starting at the edge of the ocean. Plants evolve vascularity, the ability to transport water and nutrients through their tissues. Ocean life becomes larger and more complex, and some creatures venture out of reefs and onto land.

300 Million years ago we arrived at the Late Carboniferous.

Our planet as seen 300 million years ago. 

Image Credit: dinosaurpictures.org

Plants developed root systems that allowed them to grow larger and move inland. Environments evolved below tree canopies. Atmospheric oxygen increased as plants spread on land. Early reptiles have evolved, and giant insects diversify. Earth still looks unrecognizable.

If we travel to 200 million years ago, to the Late Triassic, we see a more familiar planet, although continents we see today have still not formed.

During the Late Triassic, an extinction event is about to happen, resulting in the disappearance of 76% of all terrestrial and marine life species and significantly reducing surviving populations. Some families, such as pterosaurs, crocodiles, mammals, and fish were minimally affected.

The first true dinosaurs emerge.

Earth, 105 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period begins to take a more familiar shape. During this period, Ceratopsian and pachycephalosaurid dinosaurs evolve. Modern mammal, bird, and insect groups emerge.

20 million years ago we see planet Earth during the Neocene Period where mammals and birds continue to evolve into modern forms. Early hominids emerge in Africa.

Check out the map and enjoy scrolling through Earth’s long history.

The map offers a unique educational experience that will surely help us understand not only how continents have shifted and changed through history, but it will also help us understand how they will continue doing so.

Continental Drift: 3.3 Billion Years

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 21:42 geschreven door peter  

How Would Humanity React If We Really Found Aliens?

If aliens reach out to us, what would happen first?

It’s a question that has puzzled science-fiction fans and scientists alike for decades, and we already may have a hint of how people will react. On Oct. 30, 1938, a dramatized version of the 1898 H.G. Wells novel “The War of the Worlds” played on the CBS Radio system across the United States. The story details how Martians attacked Earth.

The radio broadcast caused a reaction when people mistook it for a real radio report, but accounts vary as to how much of a reaction there was. Some accounts describe nationwide panic, while others say not very many people actually listened to the broadcast. The promise of alien life stars in Episode 1 of “AMC Visionaries: James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction,” which debuts on AMC tonight. Still, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher Duncan Forgan told Space.com the “War of the Worlds” broadcast may be instructive to think about as SETI scientists worldwide update their “first contact” protocols.

“If you pick the right science fiction — the hard science fiction — it’s placed in the best possible educated guesses about what will happen,” said Forgan, who is a research fellow at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He explained that “hard” science fiction refers to science fiction that emphasizes accuracy (think the 2015 movie “The Martian,” for example).

If researchers find a signal today, Forgan said, one of the things they will have to manage is a public used to getting constant news updates on Twitter and other forms of social media. It’s something Forgan and his colleagues are already working on. The International Academy of Astronautics SETI Permanent Committee created a post-detection protocol in 1989 that was slightly updated in 2010; a new update is starting soon and should be finished in a few years, Forgan said.

Scientific work

For the most part, scientists assume alien contact would happen through a signal purposely sent toward Earth. The “acid test” is to make sure the signal is verified by multiple observatories, said SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak. “It would take a while to verify, and then the people who like to think about these matters say you would have a press conference and announce this to the world,” he said, but he added that wouldn’t work unless everyone in the project were sworn to secrecy. In this era of news leaks, he said that situation is very unlikely to hold.

So, scientists try instead to stick to a protocol that includes informing the public. The 2010 IAA protocol is only two pages and covers facets such as searching for a signal, handling evidence and what to do in the case of a confirmed detection.

If the evidence gets out to the public while the scientists are still analyzing the signal, Forgan said they could manage the public’s expectations by using something called the Rio Scale. It’s essentially a numeric value that represents the degree of likelihood that an alien contact is “real.” (Forgan added that the Rio Scale is also undergoing an update, and more should be coming out about it in May.)

If the aliens did arrive here, “first contact” protocols likely would be useless, because if they’re smart enough to show up physically, they could probably do anything else they like, according to Shostak. “Personally, I would leave town,” Shostak quipped. “I would get a rocket and get out of the way. I have no idea what they are here for.”

But there’s little need to worry. An “Independence Day” scenario of aliens blowing up important national buildings such as the White House is extremely unlikely, Forgan said, because interstellar travel is difficult. (This feeds into something called the Drake Equation, which considers where the aliens could be and helps show why we haven’t heard anything from them yet.)

Early SETI work

To find a signal, first we have to be listening for it. SETI “listening” is going on all over the world, and in fact, this has been happening for many decades. The first modern SETI experiment took place in 1960. Under Project Ozma, Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope (located at Green Bank, West Virginia) at two stars called Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. He scanned at a frequency astronomers nickname “the water hole,” which is close to the frequency of light that’s given off by hydrogen and hydroxyl (one hydrogen atom bonded to one oxygen atom).

In 1977, The Ohio State University SETI’s program made international headlines after a project volunteer, Jerry Ehman, wrote, “Wow!” beside a strong signal a telescope there received. The Aug. 15, 1977, “Wow” signal was never repeated, however.

There have been many, many projects since then. As a taste: The SETI Institute was founded in 1984; while it may be the most famous of the SETI projects, there are many other independent SETIs at universities and institutions worldwide that have done work over the decades. One of the center’s major initiatives was Project Phoenix, which scanned nearby, sun-like stars. Currently, the SETI Institute, in collaboration with other institutes, is working on a concept called the Allen Telescope Array, which has dozens of radio dishes in northern California.

In 2015, the well-known physicist Stephen Hawking and many other researchers launched Breakthrough Listen, a project that will scan 1 million Milky Way stars and 100 nearby galaxies for extraterrestrial life.

Space-based SETI

While searches of alien messages aren’t ongoing in space, there have been efforts to communicate with any beings that may come across our spacecraft.

The Pioneer 10 and 11 probes flew by Jupiter (and in Pioneer 11’s case, Saturn) to eventually make their way out of the solar system. Before their launches in 1972 and 1973, respectively, a Pioneer plaque was mounted on board each spacecraft. It shows the form of the human body and where the Earth is located in the galaxy.

The twin Voyager probes launched in 1977 to examine the outer solar system. Voyager 2 reached interstellar space in 2012, while Voyager 1 is still at the edge of the solar system. Each of the spacecraft includes two golden records with sounds recorded on Earth, ranging from whale calls to music to the word “hello” in many languages. The record also has diagrams of the human body and where our solar system is located.

Scientists also transmitted a radio message from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in 1974. The so-called Arecibo Message includes such things as the numbers 1 through 10; the atomic numbers of elements such as hydrogen and oxygen; information about DNA; and diagrams of a human body, the Earth and our solar system.

In a related field, the study of exoplanets has accelerated in recent years with the Kepler mission, which has found more than 2,000 confirmed exoplanets alone, as well as other observatories on the ground and in space. Scientists are now trying to characterize which of these planets may be the most habitable. Atmospheric studies and more detailed looks at star activity will be some of the activities scientists undertake with future telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch in 2020.

This story was inspired by Episode 1 of “AMC Visionaries: James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction,” which airs tonight at 10 p.m. EDT/PDT (9 p.m. CDT). A companion book is available on Amazon.com.

Attribution: Elizabeth Howell, Space.com

{ http://www.etupdates.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 21:22 geschreven door peter  

NASA Technology Helps Reveal Hidden Texts On Dead Sea Scrolls In Stunning Discovery

Who says that NASA only makes fantastic discoveries in space?

Using a specialized camera initially developed by NASA, researchers in Israel made a stunning discovery while analyzing texts on the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

According to an announcement by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), experts have uncovered previously hidden text on the Dead Sea Scrolls, raising many questions whether there are more ancient manuscripts featuring writings invisible to the naked eye.

After analyzing the ancient manuscripts with infrared using a multispectral imaging camera, experts from Israel have revealed that dozens of ancient scroll fragments, previously thought to be blank, actually contain traces of ink.

The Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, which are believed to be around 2,000 years old are extremely fragile.

Image Credit: Shai Halevi Israel Antiquities Authority

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a massive historical collection featuring more than 900 religious manuscripts, as well as miniature text fragments recovered in a cave system (Qumran Caves) near the shores of the Dead Sea, near the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran.

Oren Ableman, a researcher on the manuscripts of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and a Ph.D. student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered the new writing while examining a dozen fragments of finding in the Qumran Caves, revealed the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The detailed study, conducted by Ableman has allowed deciphering the writing of many of the fragments and even knowing which manuscripts probably belong to some of the new fragments.

Oren Ableman, a scroll researcher at the Dead Sea Scrolls unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority, examining the ink traces that have been discovered.

Image Credit: Shai Halevi, The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.

“I do feel honored to be part of it. Sometimes I feel like, I’m just a Ph.D. student, and I’m finding these discoveries,” said Abelman. “It’s exciting.”

The discovery was presented at a conference in Israel called “The Dead Sea Scrolls at Seventy: Clear a Path in the Wilderness.”

“As part of the project each of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls is imaged to monitor its physical condition and make the best possible images available to the public,” the organization wrote in a statement.

As noted in the statement, the discovery made by experts features fragments from the books of Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Jubilees (also known as the Lesser Genesis), and The Temple Scroll, which is the longest of all the Dead Sea Scrolls found to date. These ancient manuscripts have been dated to range from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century CE.

The hidden writings reveal a script that belongs to a third copy of the temple scroll, an ancient text where God explains to Moses how a temple should be erected, and how services within the temple should be performed.

Until now, experts were only aware of the existence of two Temple Scrolls, but the discovery adds another one to the collection.

Also, researchers have identified a fragment belonging to the Scroll of the Great Psalms (11Q5); retaining a part of the beginning of Psalm 147: 1.

And, finally, another fragment contains letters written in an ancient Hebrew script (paleo-Hebrew alphabet).

This fragment could not be attributed to any of the known manuscripts, so it is possible that it belonged to a still, hitherto unknown manuscript.

According to Head of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Dead Sea Scrolls Lab Pnina Shor, “Multispectral imaging lets us read what is invisible to the eye.”

“Every image is an act of preservation,” said Shor. “If God forbid, something happens to the scroll; we still have 100% accurately reliable images.”

Source: The Times Of Israel

Featured Image Credit: The Great Psalms Scroll (11Q5) together with the new fragment containing Psalm 147:1. Shai Halevi, The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 21:03 geschreven door peter  

Underwater Drones Are Exploring Shipwrecks Below The Gulf Of Mexico—And What They’ve Found Is Incredible

Among many incredible finds, researchers have discovered never-before-seen, unidentified shipwrecks located thousands of feet below the surface.

That there are many secrets hidden beneath the ocean is no mystery. That we haven’t had the time nor interest in exploring these secrets also isn’t a mystery.

However, Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are conducting an expedition to explore the many shipwrecks located in the uncharted water in some of the deepest parts of the Gulf of Mexico, and what they’ve recorded is beyond fascinating.

In order to explore the unknown, researchers used remote-controlled submersible vehicles, discovering never-before-seen details and investigating different shipwrecks on the ocean floor, located in the most remote, least-explored pars of the Gulf of Mexico.

Among the discoveries, researchers uncovered German U-boats, as well as pirate vessels believed to date back to the 19th century.

Now, using modern technology, experts are trying to learn as much as they can about the histories and fates of these ships, which the ocean claimed in the distant past.

Among the discoveries, experts from NOAA found the remains of a tugboat, named New Hope, which sank in a tropical storm in the 1960’s. While the ship sank, the Coast Guard luckily saved the crew from going down with the ship.

Seen here is the bow and view into the hull of what is believed to be the wreck of the tugboat New Hope.

Image credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Gulf of Mexico 2018.

Speaking about the shipwreck of the New Hope, experts from NOAA said:

“On September 29, 1965, New Hope encountered the strong winds and high seas of Tropical Storm Debbie off the Louisiana coast. With the crew having trouble pumping water out of the hull, the U.S. Coast Guard received a distress call around 1 AM and dispatched an aircraft to deploy a backup pump. Also, on board, the aircraft was the latest in Search and Rescue technology: a floating radio beacon for use with a radio direction finder. In use, the beacon is dropped close to the distressed vessel to mark its position and to act as a drifting reference.

The seven-member crew boarded a life raft and abandoned the foundering New Hope at 3 AM, just as the aircraft arrived to mark its position with the beacon. Staying on the scene until daylight, the aircraft vectored a Coast Guard helicopter to the raft to conduct a safe rescue of the entire crew.”

But New Hope is just one of the many shipwrecks photographed by the underwater mission.

Check out some more images courtesy of NOAA.

An unidentified shipwreck discovered by industry mapping surveys. According to NOAA, it appeared to be a portion of a wooden vessel with a few metal items inside.

Image credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Gulf of Mexico 2018.

Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Gulf of Mexico 2018.

Deep Discoverer explored an unknown shipwreck identified by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management simply as “ID Number 15377.”

Image credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Gulf of Mexico 2018.

Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Gulf of Mexico 2018.

Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Gulf of Mexico 2018.

Not a shipwreck but a natural extrusion of tar on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Gulf of Mexico 2012.

View inside the conning tower of the German U-boat U-166.

Image courtesy of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Seen here is the bow of a ship that’s believed to be a privateer.

Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Gulf of Mexico 2012.

Source: NOAA

Image Credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 20:51 geschreven door peter  

The moon’s shadow launched a ripple that was seen from Brazil an hour later

BY  LISA GROSSMAN 

IN THE SHADOW  

The solar eclipse on August 21, 2017, was seen from space by the DSCOVR satellite. The moon’s shadow spurred an atmospheric wave that propagated around the world for hours after the eclipse was over.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

06-05-2018 om 20:37 geschreven door peter  

Listen to the sound of our galaxy rotating. The variation of musical pitches portrays the motion of gas as it orbits around the center of our galaxy.

Scientists often transform astronomy data into pictures, but University of Californa Santa Barbara postdoctoral fellow Greg Salvesen went in a different direction. He decided to map raw data to sound.

Salvesen’s recently launched website, Astronomy Sound of the Month or AstroSoM, features different sounds produced from actual astronomy data, with an explanation by an astronomer. Salvesen said in a statement:

AstroSoM explores how sound complements more traditional astronomy data analysis. Besides, making sounds out of real astronomy data is just plain cool!

For his latest feature (above), Salvesen collaborated with University of Massachusetts astronomy professor Mark Heyer to turn complex data into visual and aural components that track the movement of gas through our galaxy. The resulting Milky Way Blues allow you to “hear” how our galaxy rotates.

For the composition, Heyer developed an algorithm that transforms astronomical data about galactic gases into musical notes. By assigning different tones and length of notes to the observed spectra of each gas phase, said Heyer, an astronomer can express a crucial feature of the galaxy that is missing in astronomical images – movement.

Heyer chose to compose this piece using a pentatonic scale – with five notes in the octave instead of seven – and in a minor key, because, he said:

When I heard the bass notes it sounded jazzy and blue.

But, he added:

I’ve been true to the data, I haven’t massaged it to make it sound nice, but by turning what we actually observe with a radio telescope into a musical scale it gives us familiar tones that sound surprisingly like music with which we’re familiar.

Here’s the explanation of the Milky Way Blues, from AstroSoM:

Radio telescopes observe different spectral emission lines to probe different phases of gas (atomic, molecular, ionized). Astronomers measure the Doppler shifts of these lines to determine gas velocities along the path that the telescope is pointing. To turn one of these observations into musical notes, the measured gas velocities are mapped to a pentatonic minor blues scale.

Each note and circle represents gas that is either coming toward Earth (high notes and blue color) or moving away from it (low notes and red color). Different gas phases are played by different instruments — acoustic bass (atomic), wood blocks (molecular), saxophone (ionized) and piano (molecular) — and are represented by different colored borders on the circles.

A line showing where the telescope was pointing represents each observation, and the positions of the circles along a line show the locations of the gas in the galaxy. The star symbol shows the location of the sun. The intensity of the emission coming from the gas is heard as longer note durations and shown as larger circles.

With every new measure, the lines swing around to new observations. Putting it all together, the variation of musical pitches heard in Milky Way Blues portrays the motion of gas as it orbits around the center of our galaxy.

Check out more pieces on the AstroSoM website, such as The Inner Solar System Plays Radiohead’s Saddest Song, or Never a Mundane Supernova in the Sky. Each post includes a short summary and links for more detailed explanations.

Greg Salvesen.

Image via Sonia Fernandez.

Bottom line: An astronomer transforms raw astronomy data into music.

Read more from UC Santa Barbara

{ http://earthsky.org/ }

06-05-2018 om 20:23 geschreven door peter  

NASA PLUTO PROBE MAY CARRY CROWDSOURCED MESSAGE TO ALIENS

A NASA Pluto probe may end up with one final mission after its work exploring the outer solar system is done — carrying a message to advanced alien civilizations.

NASA is considering allowing a team of researchers, teachers, artists and engineers to upload an interstellar message to the agency’s New Horizons spacecraft, which will perform the first-ever flyby of Pluto on July 14.

This project, known as the One Earth Message, is being led by Jon Lomberg, who was design director for the “golden records” that were placed aboard NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft before their 1977 launch to teach any aliens that might encounter the probes about humanity and its home planet. 

The goals of the One Earth Message are similar, but the new project would be a more global and collaborative effort, asking people around the world to contribute images, sounds and ideas for this farflung “message in a bottle.”

“This is really a chance to try to think about ourselves from the long perspective,” Lomberg told Space.com. “We’ll never know if this extraterrestrial audience that we’re designing it for will receive it. But we do know that the people of Earth who participate, who play a role in it — it can literally change their lives.”

A digital message

Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, and Voyager 2 will join its twin in this rarefied realm soon. The two probes’ golden records are actual records — 12-inch-wide (30 centimeters) gold-plated copper disks that come with cartridges, needles and instructions about how to play them. The identical records contain 115 analog-encoded images, as well as audio of thunder and other natural sounds, music and spoken greetings in 55 different languages.

The One Earth Message, by contrast, would be digital. If NASA greenlights the project — the space agency has expressed enthusiasm but has yet to approve it officially, Lomberg said — the team will be allowed to beam 150 megabytes of data to New Horizons.

The One Earth Message would therefore hold about the same amount of information as Voyager’s golden records — perhaps 100 images and about an hour of audio, Lomberg said. (Videos would take up too much memory.)

“We’re writing a haiku, not a novel,” he said.

The digital format would allow the One Earth Message to be more flexible, layered and integrated than was possible with the golden records, Lomberg added. For example, the message could be changed over time by beaming more files to New Horizons. It could also include a map of the world, and every picture and every sound could be tagged to the spot from which it came. 

Crowdsourced content and funding

There’s another key difference between the Voyager and New Horizons efforts: While the golden records carry information chosen by a small committee (which was chaired by famed astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan), the One Earth Message would be a crowdsourced affair, with contributions from people around the globe.

“It’s not simply a photo contest,” Lomberg said. “It’s a process that’s going to find out what people want to send.”

Just as the One Earth Message’s content would be crowdsourced, a chunk of its funding would be too. (The team is not asking NASA to pay for the project.) Lomberg and his colleagues hope to raise at least $500,000 from people around the world via a Fiat Physica campaign, to build and maintain a Web presence and to figure out the best way to program the message.

Additional money raised would be used for education and outreach, among other things.

“The total budget is a couple of million [dollars], to do everything we’d like to do,” Lomberg said.

People would be able to contribute a certain number of photos for possible inclusion in the One Earth Message for free, he added. Anyone who wants to submit additional pictures would be able to do so, for a fee that would help cover the costs of the project’s website.

The One Earth Message Fiat Physica campaign runs through July 15. As of yesterday evening (May 17), the crowdfunding effort had raised about $12,000 of its $500,000 target. You can learn more about the campaign here: http://www.fiatphysica.com/campaigns/oem/

The group is also looking for private support, Lomberg said. 

Plenty of time

Drawing up a message designed to be understood by alien civilizationsis not a simple or straightforward task. For example, how would any hypothetical extraterrestrials that chance upon New Horizons even know that humanity is trying to say something to them?

“How can you send files so that aliens can figure them out? They’re not going to know what a jpeg is,” Lomberg said. “Our challenge is to find ways of coding the message so that it calls attention to itself as a message.”

But there’s plenty of time to work on such issues. The transmission to New Horizons would occur in July 2016 at the earliest, Lomberg said, and it could even be postponed until after the probe flies by a second faraway object in 2019 during a potential extended mission that NASA is mulling.

While the One Earth Message is designed to be interpreted by aliens, it’s a worthwhile exercise even if New Horizons zooms through space alone for all of its days, Lomberg said. The project, he stressed, has the potential to get people more excited about the New Horizons mission and space exploration in general — and possibly to bring people around the world together in a perspective-altering experience.

“For almost 40 years, I’ve seen how the Voyager record has inspired people,” Lomberg said. “It seems like it’s time for another generation to have that same type of inspiration.”

Source www.space.com

Also published on Medium.

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 20:11 geschreven door peter  

NASA PLUTO PROBE MAY CARRY CROWDSOURCED MESSAGE TO ALIENS

A NASA Pluto probe may end up with one final mission after its work exploring the outer solar system is done — carrying a message to advanced alien civilizations.

NASA is considering allowing a team of researchers, teachers, artists and engineers to upload an interstellar message to the agency’s New Horizons spacecraft, which will perform the first-ever flyby of Pluto on July 14.

This project, known as the One Earth Message, is being led by Jon Lomberg, who was design director for the “golden records” that were placed aboard NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft before their 1977 launch to teach any aliens that might encounter the probes about humanity and its home planet. 

The goals of the One Earth Message are similar, but the new project would be a more global and collaborative effort, asking people around the world to contribute images, sounds and ideas for this farflung “message in a bottle.”

“This is really a chance to try to think about ourselves from the long perspective,” Lomberg told Space.com. “We’ll never know if this extraterrestrial audience that we’re designing it for will receive it. But we do know that the people of Earth who participate, who play a role in it — it can literally change their lives.”

A digital message

Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, and Voyager 2 will join its twin in this rarefied realm soon. The two probes’ golden records are actual records — 12-inch-wide (30 centimeters) gold-plated copper disks that come with cartridges, needles and instructions about how to play them. The identical records contain 115 analog-encoded images, as well as audio of thunder and other natural sounds, music and spoken greetings in 55 different languages.

The One Earth Message, by contrast, would be digital. If NASA greenlights the project — the space agency has expressed enthusiasm but has yet to approve it officially, Lomberg said — the team will be allowed to beam 150 megabytes of data to New Horizons.

The One Earth Message would therefore hold about the same amount of information as Voyager’s golden records — perhaps 100 images and about an hour of audio, Lomberg said. (Videos would take up too much memory.)

“We’re writing a haiku, not a novel,” he said.

The digital format would allow the One Earth Message to be more flexible, layered and integrated than was possible with the golden records, Lomberg added. For example, the message could be changed over time by beaming more files to New Horizons. It could also include a map of the world, and every picture and every sound could be tagged to the spot from which it came. 

Crowdsourced content and funding

There’s another key difference between the Voyager and New Horizons efforts: While the golden records carry information chosen by a small committee (which was chaired by famed astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan), the One Earth Message would be a crowdsourced affair, with contributions from people around the globe.

“It’s not simply a photo contest,” Lomberg said. “It’s a process that’s going to find out what people want to send.”

Just as the One Earth Message’s content would be crowdsourced, a chunk of its funding would be too. (The team is not asking NASA to pay for the project.) Lomberg and his colleagues hope to raise at least $500,000 from people around the world via a Fiat Physica campaign, to build and maintain a Web presence and to figure out the best way to program the message.

Additional money raised would be used for education and outreach, among other things.

“The total budget is a couple of million [dollars], to do everything we’d like to do,” Lomberg said.

People would be able to contribute a certain number of photos for possible inclusion in the One Earth Message for free, he added. Anyone who wants to submit additional pictures would be able to do so, for a fee that would help cover the costs of the project’s website.

The One Earth Message Fiat Physica campaign runs through July 15. As of yesterday evening (May 17), the crowdfunding effort had raised about $12,000 of its $500,000 target. You can learn more about the campaign here: http://www.fiatphysica.com/campaigns/oem/

The group is also looking for private support, Lomberg said. 

Plenty of time

Drawing up a message designed to be understood by alien civilizationsis not a simple or straightforward task. For example, how would any hypothetical extraterrestrials that chance upon New Horizons even know that humanity is trying to say something to them?

“How can you send files so that aliens can figure them out? They’re not going to know what a jpeg is,” Lomberg said. “Our challenge is to find ways of coding the message so that it calls attention to itself as a message.”

But there’s plenty of time to work on such issues. The transmission to New Horizons would occur in July 2016 at the earliest, Lomberg said, and it could even be postponed until after the probe flies by a second faraway object in 2019 during a potential extended mission that NASA is mulling.

While the One Earth Message is designed to be interpreted by aliens, it’s a worthwhile exercise even if New Horizons zooms through space alone for all of its days, Lomberg said. The project, he stressed, has the potential to get people more excited about the New Horizons mission and space exploration in general — and possibly to bring people around the world together in a perspective-altering experience.

“For almost 40 years, I’ve seen how the Voyager record has inspired people,” Lomberg said. “It seems like it’s time for another generation to have that same type of inspiration.”

Source www.space.com

Also published on Medium.

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

06-05-2018 om 20:11 geschreven door peter  

The Great Filter Hypothesis – Where Are All The Alien Civilizations?

It’s difficult to not be pessimistic when considering humanity’s future prospects. Many people would agree that it’s more likely than not that we’ll eventually do ourselves in. And in fact, some astrobiologists theorize that all advanced civilizations hit the same insurmountable developmental wall we have. They call it the Great Filter. It’s a notion that’s often invoked to explain why we’ve never been visited by extraterrestrials.

With no evidence of intelligent life other than ourselves, it appears that the process of starting with a star and ending with “Advanced Universe Exploring life” must be unlikely. This implies that at least one step in this process must be improbable. This list, while incomplete (I am sure), describes the following nine steps in an “evolutionary path” that results in the colonization of the observable universe:

1. The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
2. Reproductive molecules (e.g., RNA)
3. Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
4. Complex (eukaryotic) single-cell life
5. Sexual reproduction
6. Multi-cell life
7. Tool-using animals with big brains
8. Where we are now
9. Colonization explosion.

The Great Filter is the idea that although there is lots of matter, we observe no “Advanced Universe Exploring life”, like space-faring intelligences. So there is some filter through which almost all matter gets stuck before becoming expanding, lasting life. One question for those interested in the future of humankind is whether we have already ‘passed’ the bulk of the filter, or does it still lie ahead? For example, is it very unlikely matter will be able to form self-replicating units, but once it clears that hurdle becoming intelligent and going across the stars is highly likely; or is it getting to a humankind level of development is not that unlikely, but very few of those civilizations progress to expanding across the stars. If the latter, that motivates a concern for working out what the forthcoming filter(s) are, and trying to get past them.

According to the Great Filter hypothesis, at least one of these steps — if the list were complete — must be improbable. If it’s not an early step (i.e., in our past), then the implication is that the improbable step lies in our future and our prospects of reaching step 9 (interstellar colonization) are still bleak. If the past steps are likely, then many civilizations would have developed to the current level of the human species. However, none appear to have made it.

However, none appear to have made it to step 9, or the Milky Way would be full of colonies. So perhaps step 9 is the unlikely one, and the only thing that appears likely to keep us from step 9 is some sort of catastrophe or the resource exhaustion leading to rampant consumption of the available resources (like for example highly constrained energy resources). So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.

Although steps 1–8 have occurred on Earth, any one of these may be unlikely. If the first seven steps are necessary preconditions to calculating the likelihood (using the local environment) then an anthropically biased observer can infer nothing about the general probabilities from its (pre-determined) surroundings.

One concern is that advancing technology gives the possibility of civilizations wiping themselves out, and it is this that is the main component of the Great Filter – one we are going to be approaching soon. There are several candidates for which technology will be an existential threat (nanotechnology/’Grey goo’, nuclear holocaust, runaway climate change), but one that looms large is Artificial intelligence (AI), and trying to understand and mitigate the existential threat from AI is the main role of the Singularity Institute consider AI the main existential threat.

The concern with AI is something like this:

1. AI will soon greatly surpass us in intelligence in all domains.
2. If this happens, AI will rapidly supplant humans as the dominant force on planet earth.
3. Almost all AIs, even ones we create with the intent to be benevolent, will probably be unfriendly to human flourishing.

Or, you can think of it this way.

… AI leads to intelligence explosion, and because we don’t know how to give an AI benevolent goals, by default an intelligence explosion will optimize the world for accidentally disastrous ends. A controlled intelligence explosion, on the other hand, could optimize the world for good.

So, the aim of the game needs to be trying to work out how to control the future intelligence explosion so the vastly smarter-than-human AIs are ‘friendly’ (FAI) and make the world better for us, rather than unfriendly AIs (UFAI) which end up optimizing the world for something that sucks.

Where is everybody?

Yes, it is possible that the extreme difficulty and rarity of life’s origin or some early step, so that, other than here on Earth, all life in the universe is stuck before this early extremely hard step. But even if you find this the most likely outcome, surely given our ignorance you must also place a non-trivial probability on other possibilities. You must see a great filter as lying between initial planets and expanding civilizations, and wonder how far along that filter we are. In particular, you must estimate a substantial chance of “disaster”, i.e., something destroying our ability or inclination to make a visible use of the vast resources we see. (And this disaster can’t be an unfriendly super-AI because that should be visible.)

This made me realize that UFAI should also be counted as an ‘expanding lasting life’, and should be deemed unlikely by the Great Filter.

Alternatively, if the Great Filter still lies ahead of us, and a major component of this forthcoming filter is the threat from UFAI, we should expect to see the UFAIs of other civilizations spreading across the universe (or not see anything at all, because they would wipe us out to optimize for their unfriendly ends). That we do not observe it disconfirms this conjunction.

It also gives a stronger argument – as the UFAI is the ‘expanding life’ we do not see, the beliefs, ‘the Great Filter lies ahead’ and ‘UFAI is a major existential risk’ lie opposed to one another: the higher your credence in the filter being ahead, the lower your credence should be in UFAI being a major existential risk (as the many civilizations like ours that go on to get caught in the filter do not produce expanding UFAIs, so expanding UFAI cannot be the main x-risk); conversely, if you are confident that UFAI is the main existential risk, then you should think the bulk of the filter is behind us (as we don’t see any UFAIs, there cannot be many civilizations like ours in the first place, as we are quite likely to realize an expanding UFAI).

This is, of course, a variant on the Fermi paradox: We don’t see clues to widespread, large-scale engineering, and consequently, we must conclude that we’re alone. But the possibly flawed assumption here is when we say that highly visible construction projects are an inevitable outcome of intelligence. It could be that it’s the engineering of the small, rather than the large, that is inevitable. This follows from the laws of inertia (smaller machines are faster, and require less energy to function) as well as the speed of light (small computers have faster internal communication). It may be – and this is, of course, speculation – that advanced societies are building small technology and have little incentive or need to rearrange the stars in their neighbourhoods, for instance.

They may prefer to build nanobots instead of Dyson spheres. It should also be kept in mind that, as Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“… I would like to add to the phrase “or be unrecognizable altogether“.

So, if the Great Filter is behind us, it would do much to explain the Fermi Paradox and the absence of extraterrestrial influence on the cosmos. Should that be the case, we may very well have a bright future ahead of us. The Milky Way Galaxy is literally ours for the taking, our future completely open-ended.

But before we jump to conclusions, it’s only fair to point out that we’re not out of the woods yet. There could very well be another Great Filter in the future — one just as stingy as the filters of our past. The universe, while giving the appearance of bio-friendliness, may, in reality, be extremely hostile to intelligent life.

{ http://www.theangryufologist.us/ }

06-05-2018 om 19:05 geschreven door peter  

Zwaarste aardbeving in 40 jaar en vulkaanuitbarsting richten ravage aan op Hawaï. Bekijk spectaculaire beelden van de lavastroom

Het grootste eiland van Hawaï is getroffen door de zwaarste aardbeving in 40 jaar tijd. De aardbeving met een kracht van 6,9 op de schaal van Richter was één van de honderden aardbevingen van de afgelopen week.

Het epicentrum laag bij de zuidkant van de vulkaan Kilauea, die sinds donderdag al lava spuwt. Er zitten grote scheuren in een aantal wegen.

De Kilauea, één van de actiefste vulkanen ter wereld, spuwde gedurende twee uur lava. Zo’n 1700 mensen moesten hun huizen verlaten omdat lava uit scheuren in de grond kwam.

Tienduizend

De lava stroomde onder meer een woonwijk binnen. Tienduizend Hawaïanen is gevraagd hun woning te laten.

De autoriteiten hadden na eerdere schokken, die heel wat schade hebben aangericht, al een evacuatie bevolen in de omgeving van de actieve vulkaan.

De aarde beefde vrijdag rond 12.32 uur lokale tijd (23.32 uur in Nederland) en een uur later opnieuw, zo meldde het Amerikaanse geologische onderzoekscentrum USGS.

Tulsi Gabbard

✔@TulsiGabbard

I'm glad to be in Hawaiʻi to help mobilize federal support and assist those who are having to flee their homes. What matters the most is the community coming together to help support the families who were directly impacted through the evacuations.

5:00 AM - May 5, 2018

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Helemaal niet stabiel

Donderdag was er al een aardbeving van 5,0 met tientallen naschokken geweest op het eiland. De autoriteiten waarschuwen dat de toestand helemaal niet stabiel is.

Op videobeelden is te zien hoe magma omhoog komt door een gat in de weg en hoe lava door het bos stroomt.

© Copyright (c) NineForNews.nl

06-05-2018 om 18:54 geschreven door peter  

When is a UFO not a UFO? When the government says it isn’t. When is something that looks like a rocket launch not a rocket launch? When the government says it isn’t. When is the government lying about a mysterious object in the sky? That’s the question thousands of witnesses in China are asking after seeing what appeared to be a rocket launch that the Chinese government vehemently denies it was not (pictures here). OK, Beijing, then what was it?

“Bizarre scene appeared in the sky over Beijing. Have you seen it?”

The social media posts began immediately after an unidentified flying object appeared over western Beijing, Taiyuan, Zhengzhou, Qingdao and across a wide area of northeastern China on the night of April 27th. Unlike most sightings, these posts included clear pictures and videos of the UFO, which looked suspiciously like the mysterious UFO seen over California on December 23, 2017, that turned out to be a nighttime SpaceX launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The editor of a science website confirmed that the vast area of sightings at the same time showed the object was in the upper atmosphere. However, the lights seemed to change colors and directions that were not indicative of a rocket carrying a satellite payload.

An example of a high-altitude directional change

The mass speculation didn’t stop the Chinese government from doing what it always does … nothing. This silence came despite the fact that everyone knows the airspace over the country, and especially Beijing, is strictly regulated. Proving that everyone in the world wants to believe, social media sites exploded with the usual comments on aliens, flying saucers and the like. Proving that governments worldwide are more concerned about their image than keeping their people informed, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (a national scientific think tank) and The People’s Daily (the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party) issued what now constitutes an official government statement … a tweet.

“The alleged “#UFO” seen in the sky above northern China on Friday evening was a noctilucent contrail, possibly caused by aircraft engine exhaust or air pressure changes, says the Chinese Academy of Science, warning the clouds as a sign of #globalwarming.”

A glowing pink contrail … what a relief. Or is it, conspiracy fans? “Noctilucent” (Latin for “night shining”) is used to describe clouds in the upper atmosphere whose altitude makes them visible during the twilight portion of night. This is a new term for the highest known and extremely rare clouds which only occur in the summer (it’s still spring) and only when the conditions include water vapor, dust and very cold temperatures. “Contrail” is short for “condensation trail” … not “Contrary to what they say, the government is using jets to poison us without fail.” While noctilucent vapor clouds have been linked to space shuttle launches and a few rocket launches, their main causes are believed to be volcanic eruptions and climate change.

Noctilucent clouds photographed by the crew of the ISS

Despite the facts (not summer, no recent nearby volcanic eruptions, seemingly later than twilight), the Chinese Academy of Sciences stuck with the noctilucent contrail from “aircraft engine exhaust” explanation. All together now … what aircraft?

Proving that governments worldwide don’t like to be asked tough questions … or even seemingly easy ones … there were no further comments.

They probably wouldn’t even like it if some Chinese teens thought “Noctilucent Contrails” would be a great name for their band.

{http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

06-05-2018 om 16:24 geschreven door peter  

Just about everyone has heard of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), but what about Unidentified Future Objects? Alien encounters have been reported for decades. If there is one thing that the aliens are keen to tell us and have us believe, it’s that they originate on other worlds. But, are they being truthful with us? Might they really be time-travelers? In H.G. Wells’ classic novel of 1895, The Time Machine, an adventurous Londoner heads off into a dark future, where he clashes with cave-dwelling monsters, explores ruined cities and witnesses the final moments of life on Earth. In the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston’s character, Taylor, an American astronaut, arrives on a nightmarish world run by a race of talking apes. Only at the film’s climax, as he stumbles upon the remains of the Statue of Liberty, does Taylor realize with horror that he has not set foot on some far-off planet, after all. Rather, he is home, 2,000 years in the future and after a worldwide holocaust has destroyed human civilization.

Then there is Michael J. Fox’s character, Marty McFly, who in the 1985 Hollywood comedy blockbuster, Back to the Future, travels through time to 1955. On doing so, he almost makes out with his then-teenage mom, comes perilously close to wiping out his own existence as a result of his time-traveling antics, and in single-handed fashion invents rock ‘n’ roll. And let’s not forget Bruce Willis in 1995’s 12 Monkeys. At least as far as mega-bucks movies and literary classics are concerned, the theme of time-travel is a spectacularly successful one. But what of the real world? Are time-travelers really among us? Is there a direct connection between the world of time-travel and that of UFOs?

Why is it that our “aliens” conveniently speak our languages? How is it that, with no trouble at all, they can they breathe our atmosphere? Why do they abduct us and use us in bizarre genetic experiments? Surely we are not physically and genetically compatible with creatures from faraway solar-systems? They assure us that we are indeed compatible. It all sounds far too convenient and carefully stage-managed. Maybe that’s because they are not from faraway worlds, after all. Perhaps, they are from right here, on Earth. Not our Earth (so to speak), but the Earth of the future; the distant future. An Earth that is in ruins and at a time when the Human Race is perilously close to extinction.

They travel into their distant past – our present – and engage in clandestine programs to reap DNA, cells, sperm and eggs as a means to try and save what is left of us, thousands of years from now. Keenly aware of the fact that the people of the 20^thand 21^st century held deep beliefs with regard to the concept of extraterrestrial life, they chose to adopt the guises of the alien things we believe in, as a means to camouflage their real identities. Could that be the shocking truth?

Formerly of the U.S. Air Force, and one of the key military players in the famous UFO encounter at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1980, Sergeant Jim Penniston – in 1994 – underwent hypnotic regression, as part of an attempt to try and recall deeply buried data relative to what occurred to him during one of Britain’s closest encounters. Very interestingly, and while under hypnosis, Penniston stated that our presumed aliens are, in reality, visitors from a far-flung future. That future, Penniston added, is very dark, in infinitely deep trouble, polluted and where the Human Race is overwhelmingly blighted by reproductive problems. The answer to those same, massive problems, Penniston was told by the entities he met in the woods, is that they travel into the distant past – to our present day – to secure sperm, eggs and chromosomes, all as part of an effort to try and ensure the continuation of the severely waning Human Race of tomorrow.

“Time travel is not theoretically possible, for if it was they’d already be here telling us about it,” British physicist Professor Stephen Hawking famously said. And even if time-travel did one day become a possibility, it would be beset by major problems, claimed Hawking: “Suppose it were possible to go off in a rocket ship, and come back before you set off. What would stop you blowing up the rocket on its launch pad, or otherwise preventing you from setting out in the first place?”

Not everyone agrees with Hawking. One possible way of traveling through time is via what are known in physics as wormholes, a term coined in 1957 by theoretical physicist John Wheeler. The wormhole is basically a shortcut through both space and time; and although firm evidence for the existence of these so-called “time-tunnels” has not yet been firmly proven, they do not fall outside of the boundaries presented in Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Then, there is the matter of the sinister Men in Black. They are perceived by UFO researchers as human-looking alien creatures or government agents, whose secret role it is to silence UFO witnesses, something that history has shown they are very good at. Maybe, though, the MIB are not the bad guys, after all. Perhaps they are “time-cops,” working to ensure that UFO witnesses don’t get too close to the truth – namely, the time-travel angle. After all, just about everything about the MIB is out of time. They almost always wear 1950s-era black suits. Their mode of transport – old-time Cadillac cars – is out of time, too. They have even asked witnesses, on more than a few occasions: “What time is it?”

Maybe they’re actually asking what year they’re in. Or even which century. Perhaps, in the distant future, little is known of our time. Maybe we destroyed ourselves and, as a consequence, the people of the future are tasked with repairing the planet and doing their utmost to save what is left of our species. Possibly, they have limited knowledge of our culture and even our fashions, apart from what they know from the pages of aging, crumbling old magazines from the 1950s. So, they adopt the attire they assume will allow them to blend in with the people of the 21^st century, when, in reality, it’s the exact opposite. The MIB stand out like a sore thumb. Or, like a man out of time.

Paranormal researcher Joshua P. Warren comments on this link between time-travel and the Men in Black: “It could be that the Men in Black follow all this UFO stuff around; that’s their job. Not that they are causing these things to happen, but they’re alerted to it when there’s a dangerous timeline issue that needs to be corrected. They’re not necessarily the bad-guys at all; they might be doing damage control, and maybe that includes warning and silencing witnesses to protect the time-travel secret. They might be weird, and they might look weird, but their overall mission may be just to keep order and protect the timelines.”

Of course, we need to remain grounded on all of this. So far, there is no definitive proof whatsoever that we have (or have ever had) time-travelers in our midst. And, there’s no evidence that UFOs are really time-machines. So, in other words, everything is very much theoretical and speculative – and just about nothing else. But, it doesn’t hurt to speculate!

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/

06-05-2018 om 16:18 geschreven door peter