Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
02-02-2019
Disc-shaped UFO captured on video over the Netherlands
Disc-shaped UFO captured on video over the Netherlands
A man from the Netherlands uploaded this video to Mufon. The footage was captured on January 19, this year. Hardly any details were given except that he saw the unknown object flying and caught it on camera.
You will see in the short clip the disc-like object enter the scene from the right and move toward the left and away.
At first glance it looks like a typical lens flare but lens flares and reflections normally do not move through the aperture faster than the camera is moving.
UFO casebook has put a slow-mo section in to get a better view.
OMG: Clear pictures of the BLACK KNIGHT UFO satellite!
OMG: Clear pictures of the BLACK KNIGHT UFO satellite!
The Black Knight is an artificial satellite of extraterrestrial origin which has orbited Earth for approximately 13,000 years; the “satellite” story is most likely a conflation of several disconnected stories about various objects and their interpretations, all of them well documented independently and none using the term “Black Knight” upon their first publication. According to senior education support officer Martina Redpath of Armagh Planetarium in Northern Ireland.
The origin of the Black Knight legend is often “retrospectively dated” back to natural extraterrestrial repeating sources supposedly heard during the 1899 radio experiments of Nikola Tesla and long-delayed echoes first heard by amateur radio operator Jorgen Hals in Oslo, Norway, in 1928. Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast attributes Tesla’s 1899 radio signals to pulsars, which were not identified until 1968.
In 1954, UFO researcher Donald Keyhoe told newspapers that the U.S. Air Force had reported that two satellites orbiting Earth had been detected. At that time, no country had the technology to launch a satellite. Skeptics have noted that Keyhoe had been promoting a UFO book at the time, and the news stories were likely written “tongue-in-cheek” and not intended to be taken seriously.
A British rocket called the Black Knight rocket was used in conjunction with the Blue Streak missile program between 1958 and 1965, to test re-entry vehicles. A “Black Knight satellite launcher” project announced in 1964 was considered a priority by the Ministry of Aviation. The program never put anything into orbit, and it is unrelated to the Black Knight satellite legend.
In February 1960, TIME reported that the U.S. Navy had detected a dark object thought to be a Soviet spy satellite in orbit. A follow-up article confirmed that the object was “the remains of an Air Force Discoverer VIII satellite that had gone astray.”
In 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper supposedly reported a UFO sighting during his 15th orbit in Mercury 9 that was confirmed by tracking stations, but there is no evidence that this happened. Neither NASA’s mission transcripts nor Cooper’s personal copies show any such report being made during the orbit.
In 1973, Scottish author Duncan Lunan analyzed the long-delayed radio echoes received by Hals and others and speculated that they could possibly originate from a 13,000-year-old alien probe located in an orbit around the Earth’s Moon. He suggested that the probe may have originated from a planet located in the solar system of star Epsilon Boötis. Lunan later retracted his conclusions, saying that he had made “outright errors” and that his methods had been “unscientific”.
An artist's image of the violent collision that formed Earth's moon. Such collisions could explain the surprising differences in more massive super-Earths and super-Neptunes.
Credit: NASA
Catastrophic collisions may explain differences in giant rocky planets around other stars.
A new study suggests that the heat generated by material smashing into a planet plays an important role in removing some or all of a planet's atmosphere. A wide variety of sizes for these deadly asteroids would explain differences seen in the more massive rocky worlds.
NASA's planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope revealed a surprising number of worlds with sizes that fall between Earth and Neptune in relatively short orbits. By calculating the densities of the planets, astronomers learned that many of them seem to boast massive hydrogen-helium atmospheres. However, these atmospheres seem to come in many different flavors, suggesting something was happening to the worlds after planetary formation. [Tales from the Exoplanet Archive: How NASA Keeps Track of Alien Worlds]
"Giant impacts are very effective at reducing or removing the hydrogen or helium envelope," John Biersteker told his colleagues last month at the 233rd semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. Biersteker, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied how impacts by rocky debris affected the atmosphere of young planets. He found that impacts could create many different types of worlds.
"This process can also produce a wide range of outcomes," Biersteker said. "This makes giant impacts a nice explanation for some of the observed distributions for the compositions of super-Earths."
Planetary beatdown
After a star is born, the dust- and gas-filled ring left behind begins the planetary formation process. Once gravity pulls together enough pieces to create a core, the newborn planetesimal begins to collect hydrogen and helium from the leftover gas, building its primal atmosphere. Planets that are very close to their stars can be affected by stellar radiation, which heats the top layers of the gas so that it escapes into space, leaving a thinner atmosphere.
Eventually, the gas in the disk is either piled onto planets or swept away by the star, leaving behind only dust and rock. Mixed among the small and medium-size debris are the failed cores that weren't able to grow large enough to attract an atmosphere. When these massive objects slam into planets, the collision can blow the planet's atmosphere off into space. One such collision helped to form Earth's moon.
A young world still boasts a molten mantle that can make it easier for a collision to strip off its atmosphere.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/Hubble/ESO
"Giant impacts are an expected part of the formation of these systems," Biersteker said.
It turns out that you don't need a massive core to completely remove a planet's atmosphere. By simulating a variety of impacts, Biersteker found that an object only a tenth the mass of the planet can blow off anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of the hydrogen and helium surrounding the planet.
A planet's youth may also work against it when it comes to holding onto an atmosphere. When a planet is young — only a few tens of millions of years old — its core is still fully molten, with no crust to insulate it from the atmosphere. Since a hotter atmosphere is harder to hold onto, it doesn't take much of an impact to strip off some of the atmosphere. An object crashing into a planet raises the energy, in the form of heat, allowing more of the atmosphere to be blown away.
Biersteker also found that the energy created by the impact was more important than the mass of what crashed into it. That means a small, fast-moving asteroid could potentially strip off more hydrogen and helium than a slower, medium-size object. The angle the impactor hits the world can also affect the energy of the impact — a head-on collision is more dangerous than a sideswipe.
"We can expect a wide range of impacts," Biersteker said.
With each impact stripping off a different percentage of the atmosphere, collisions can create a wide variety of exoplanet densities. Incoming material with only a tenth of a planet's mass can strip off anywhere from half to all of the hydrogen and helium.
Five hundred and sixty-five million years ago, Earth's magnetic field almost disappeared.
But a geological phenomenon might have saved it, a new study suggests. Earth's then-liquid core likely began to solidify around that time, which strengthened the field, the group reported yesterday (Jan. 28) in the journalNature Geoscience. This is important because the magnetic field protects our planet and its inhabitants from harmful radiation and solar winds —streams of plasma particles thrown our wayby the sun.
Scientists figured out what our planet's core was like back then by looking at crystals the size of grains of sand.
They picked up samples of plagioclase and clinopyroxene — minerals that were formed 565 million years ago — in what is now eastern Quebec, Canada. These samples contain tiny magnetic needles about 50 to 100 nanometers in size, which, in molten rock, orient themselves in the direction of the magnetic field at the time. [Shine On: Photos of Dazzling Mineral Specimens]
"Those tiny magnetic particles are ideal magnetic recorders," said co-author John Tarduno, the chair of the Earth and Environmental Sciences department and a professor at the University of Rochester in New York. "When they cool, they lock in a record of Earth's magnetic field that's maintained for billions of years."
So, by sticking the crystals in a magnetometer, the researchers were able to figure out that the particles' charge was very low. In fact, 565 million years ago, Earth's magnetic field was over 10 times weaker than what it is today — the weakest ever documented.
Further, the measurements showed that the frequency of north and south pole reversals was very high. All of this suggests that "the field was extremely unusual," Tarduno told Live Science. "We were at this critical point where the dynamo almost collapsed completely." (The geodynamo is the process that maintains and grows the magnetic field.)
But then the geodynamo got a kick start once more — from the very core of our planet.
In Earth's early years, the core was all liquid. But at some point — guesses range from between 2.5 billion years to 500 million years ago — iron began to cool and freeze into a solid layer in the middle of the planet. As the inner core solidified, lighter elements like silicon, magnesium and oxygen were kicked out into the outer, liquid layer of the core, creating a movement of fluid and heat called convection. This movement of fluid in the outer core kept charged particles moving, creating an electrical current, which in turn created a magnetic field.
This convection drives and maintains the magnetic field even today. Earth's inner core is continuing to solidify and will do so for billions of years to come.
The researchers "present intriguing paleomagnetic measurements" that suggest a weak geodynamo existed 565 million years ago, which meant that the core was fully liquid, wrote Peter Driscoll, an earth and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was not a part of the research, in a commentary that accompanied the study. If their theory holds true, "the inner core may have occurred right in the nick of time to recharge the geodynamo and save Earth's magnetic shield."
Shortly after this time, the Cambrian explosion occurred and complex animals emerged across the planet. "One can speculate — and there have been some speculations — that a weaker magnetic field may have some relationship to these evolutionary events," Tarduno said. That is because a weaker field might allow more radiation to get through, which could cause DNA damage and higher mutation rates, which in turn, might have lead to more species evolving.
But this is mere speculation, Tarduno said. When Earth's magnetic field weakens a bit during events such as magnetic reversals (where the north and south poles flip), for instance, there's no evidence that species are affected, he added.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity captured this composite image, which looks toward the higher regions of Mount Sharp, on Sept. 9, 2015.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA'sMars rover Curiosityhas flexed some new scientific muscles, likely solving a Red Planet puzzle in the process.
Mission team members repurposed the rover's navigation gear to measure tiny variations in gravitational fields, a new study reports. This novel strategy allowed the researchers to figure out how the huge Martian mountain whose baseCuriosity is exploringformed — namely, that it was probably built up as a free-standing mound by the deposition of windblown sand and sediment.
"Going forward, I think this study shows the promise of making gravity measurements on the surfaces of other planets," said lead author Kevin Lewis, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. [Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover]
"It really gives you data about the subsurface, which is hard to get from any other instruments," Lewis told Space.com.
The car-size Curiosity rover landed on the floor of the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater in August 2012, tasked with investigating the area's past potential to host life. This work has been incredibly fruitful; Curiosity's observations show that Gale harbored a lake-and-stream system for long stretches — perhaps hundreds of millions of years at a time — in the ancient past.
Gale Crater is intriguing for other reasons as well. For example, a mountain rises 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the Martian sky from its center — a dramatic geological oddity that has no close parallel here on Earth.
Scientists have long debated just how this odd massif, known as Mount Sharp, took shape. Is it the remnant of a sedimentary structure that once filled Gale Crater but was worn away by erosion? Or did Mount Sharp coalesce in its current form, growing as Martian winds dropped dirt and sand into Gale Crater?
That's where the new study, which was published online today (Jan. 31) in the journal Science, comes in. Lewis and his colleagues mapped out the gravitational-field strength at more than 700 points along Curiosity's traverse, which has taken the rover from Gale's floor up into Mount Sharp's foothills. (Gravitational fields weaken as altitude, and therefore distance from a planet's core, increases.)
Measurements using the Curiosity Mars rover's engineering accelerometers (gray) show a decrease in the strength of gravity as the rover climbs Mount Sharp. The rate of decrease of the modeled gravity signal (black) allowed researchers to measure the density of the rocks that make up Mount Sharp.
Credit: Kevin Lewis
"It's probably more like a compacted soil than what you might think of as a nice, really well-cemented rock," Lewis said.
If these deposits had once been buried under 3 miles (5 km) of other sediments, they would almost certainly be much denser, he added. So, the new results argue that Mount Sharp was primarily built up by wind-blown deposits, not pared down from a crater-filling feature.
This isn't to suggest that a potentially habitable lake didn't once occupy Gale Crater's floor; Curiosity's observations of lakebed sediments have established this water body's past existence with high confidence, Lewis stressed. But those sediments apparently didn't go all the way to the crater rim. It remains unclear how high they got — where the transition between lake sediments and windblown deposits lies on Mount Sharp's slopes.
Orbital observations have identified an intriguing "unconformity" — a break in the previously continuous sedimentary-rock record — about 2,600 feet (800 m) above Curiosity's current location, Lewis said. So, that region is a candidate.
"We'll see if Curiosity makes it up there, or if we get pieces of that upper unit that roll down the mountain," Lewis said. "But we may have to do a bit more exploring to find such a transition."
But let's get back to the gravity data. Curiosity doesn't carry any dedicated gravimetry instruments, so how did Lewis and his team make their measurements?
By thinking outside the box. Curiosity has two "rover inertial measurement units" (RIMUs), a primary and a backup. Both RIMUs consist of three accelerometers and three gyroscopes, which the rover's handlers normally use for navigation and to determine Curiosity's orientation in space. But Lewis wondered if these engineering data could be recalibrated to capture information about gravitational fields.
"It's something that I had thought about it for a long time," he said. "I didn't expect to have precision that was high enough to be able to use for science purposes. But I started looking into the data and calibrating out some of the complicating factors, like temperature and some other variables. And, lo and behold, it got to the point where the precision was actually scientifically meaningful."
The team was therefore able to build up the first-ever "gravity traverse" on the surface of another planet. The only other such work done off Earth was performed on the moon, by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, Lewis said.
Future rover missions to Mars and other planets could make similar measurements, Lewis said. But the strategy his team used isn't universally applicable. For example, researchers probably cannot dredge gravimetry measurements out of the engineering data gathered over the years by NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. Those two golf-cart-size robots collected their engineering data in a slightly different way, Lewis said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate) is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
WATCH A SUPER-FAST 3D PRINTER SCIENTISTS CALL THE “REPLICATOR”
WATCH A SUPER-FAST 3D PRINTER SCIENTISTS CALL THE “REPLICATOR”
NATURE/UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
VICTOR TANGERMANN
Fabrication Station
3D printers work by laboriously printing objects layer by layer. For larger objects, that process can take hours or even days.
But now scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have found a shortcut: a printer that can fabricate objects in one shot using light — and which could, potentially, revolutionize rapid manufacturing technology.
The Replicator
The research, published in the journal Science yesterday, describes a printer the researchers nicknamed “the replicator” in a nod to “Star Trek.”
It works more like a computed tomography (CT) scan than a conventional 3D printer. It builds a 3D image by scanning an object from multiple angles, then projects it into a tube of synthetic resin that solidifies when exposed to certain intensities of light. In two minutes, for instance, the team was able to fabricate a tiny figurine of Auguste Rodin’s famous “The Thinker” statue.
3D Printing 2.0
The replicator might have groundbreaking implications, but it does have some inherent limitations as well: the objects it produces are small, and require special synthetic resin to produce.
But it’s an exciting new technology — and one that could lead to a “Star Trek” future.
Let’s face it: Antarctica may as well be another planet. While there are theories that the continent may have once been home to long-lost civilizations, we only know for a fact that humans have been exploring Antarctica since the late 19th century. We’ve barely even scratched the surface of an entire continent. Who knows what may lie frozen in the icy wastes of Earth’s most mysterious landmass?
NASA scientists may soon unlock those mysteries – although we probably won’t like what we find. Unless it’s Atlantis. Or the ancient wreck of an alien spacecraft containing a shapeshifting parasitic creature that may or may not take up residence inside Kurt Russell. Whatever is down there, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory want to find it. JPL nerds have been studying the frozen southernmost continent with specially designed radar satellites since 2010 and have now announced the discovery of a mysterious, giant cavity opening up beneath the continent. Just the thing the world needs!
In a press release, JPL scientists say the cavity was discovered under Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. The mysterious void is two-thirds the size of Manhattan and is over 1,000 feet (300 meters tall) – much larger than any other known cavities. If the void continues to grow, it could allow more heat and water to accumulate under the Thwaites Glacier, accelerating ice melt to the point where sea levels could rise by 2 feet or 65 centimeters. The Thwaites Glacier plays an important role in holding other neighboring ice masses in place, so if it melts or falls into the sea, there could be devastating consequences for everyone on Earth. Yikes.
While JPL is focused more on how the cavity is related to ice melts and other effects of global warming, I’m more interested in the less inevitably apocalyptic side of this story: what might we find inside this cavity if we could somehow explore it? After all, Antarctica has recently been the site of all manner of unexpected and mysterious developments lately including the recent surprising discovery of unknown organisms lying at the bottom of an ancient unexplored underground lake. What secrets could this void be hiding?
Open Minds UFO Radio: David is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker and producer. He has also had a lifelong interest in UFOs. Like many of us, David was excited about the news that the Pentagon had a secret UFO project. He was also excited about the extraordinary UFO encounter that was also featured in the New York Times article that broke the Pentagon UFO news. The encounter involved the USS Nimitz carrier strike group and occurred in November 2004 near San Diego. During training exercises a white object described as looking like a Tic Tac was spotted, jets went in to get a closer look, and then things got weird. Some of the military personnel involved with the encounter have come forward since the NYT broke the story, including David Fravor, the lead pilot who got the closest look. As a filmmaker, David saw an opportunity to help tell the story by taking all of the details publicly available and recreating the encounter. In this episode, we talk to David about his inspiration to make the film, and the details and behind the scenes behind the film’s production.
Scientists Observe A UFO Orbiting Just 300 Miles Over Earth
Scientists Observe A UFO Orbiting Just 300 Miles Over Earth
A UFO erratically orbiting near the Earth has perplexed astronomers.
The extraterrestrial object is seen orbiting as close as 373 miles, or 600 km over Earth and researchers believe it could be an Empty Trash Bag Object (ETBO). Experts think it is remnants from a rocket launch, but they are not sure which one it came from. Due to their tiny size and light mass, ETBOs have random orbit pattern.
Experts say the strange UFO is likely a piece of flimsy material, such as rocket’s metallic foil.
Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Hawaii first discovered the bewildering UFO dubbed A10bMLz.
Astronomers at Northolt Branch Observatory in London further analysed the ETBO. The mysterious object was seen stretching several metres across.
Northolt Branch said that the UFO is what is known as an empty trash bag object, which is a piece of light material left over from a rocket launch. However, it is not known yet when this rocket has been launched.
The object is orbiting the Earth at an average distance of 262,000 km at strange retrograde orbit.
ETBOS are a relatively common sight, but the A10bMLz surprised Northolt Branch Observatories because of its very distant orbit.
Astronomical software company Project Pluto said that they have no idea of the origin of this object at present because its past trajectory is really uncertain.
The extraterrestrial object is expected to soon incinerate in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Geomagnetische noordpool verplaatst zich opvallend snel
Geomagnetische noordpool verplaatst zich opvallend snel
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het gaat momenteel zo hard, dat onderzoekers het World Magnetic Model vroegtijdig moeten herzien.
Waar is de noordpool? Als je het hebt over de geografische noordpool kun je die plek vrij gemakkelijk aanwijzen. Het is de locatie waar de denkbeeldige as waar onze planeet omheen draait uit de aarde steekt. Bovendien kun je er van op aan dat de locatie van die geografische noordpool niet zo snel veranderen zal. Anders is dat wanneer je het over de geomagnetische noordpool hebt. Dat is de pool die je kompas aanwijst. En die pool is wel op vrij korte tijdschalen aan verandering onderhevig. Zo beweegt deze momenteel richting Siberië. En dat gaat behoorlijk hard. Zo hard zelfs dat onderzoekers zich genoodzaakt zien het World Magnetic Model vroegtijdig te herzien.
Te groot verschil Het World Magnetic Model wordt normaal gesproken elke vijf jaar gepubliceerd en beschrijft het aardmagnetisch veld. Bovendien voorspelt het hoe dat aardmagnetisch veld zich de komende vijf jaar gaat gedragen. De laatste keer dat er een World Magnetic Model werd gepubliceerd, was in 2015. De volgende editie staat dus gepland voor 2020. Maar zolang kan de nieuwe editie niet op zich laten wachten, omdat het verschil tussen wat de editie uit 2015 voorspelt en wat we nu daadwerkelijk zien, te groot is.
Map of magnetic variation through time from 1900 to 2015 – the magnetic poles are where the strong red and blue contours converge, and the north pole moves very quickly in recent years.
Magnetic variation in degrees – you really need to set your compass correctly when hiking!
The rate-of-change of magnetic variation in degrees per year – the changes are quickest near the north pole.
The change in the vertical component of magnetic field at the core-mantle boundary between 2015 and 2018 – the three intense patches in the northern hemisphere are related to changes like theLivermore et al (2017) “core jet” model
Waarom is dat een probleem? Het World Magnetic Model is heel belangrijk voor navigatiesystemen. Die kunnen je alleen vertellen waar je heengaat, als ze corrigeren voor het feit dat de geografische en geomagnetische noordpool niet samenvallen. Het World Magnetic Model reikt die correcties aan, maar zit er inmiddels dus behoorlijk naast, omdat het aardmagnetisch veld zich anders gedraagt dan verwacht.
Het aardmagnetisch veld wordt gegenereerd door wervelingen in de buitenkern van de aarde – die bestaat uit vloeibaar ijzer. Veranderingen in die wervelingen leiden ook tot veranderingen in het aardmagnetisch veld. Het is dus zeker niet vreemd dat de geomagnetische noordpool zich verplaatst. De snelheid waarmee dat gebeurt, heeft onderzoekers wel wat overvallen. Maar dat is niets iets om wakker van te liggen; de bewegingen van de geomagnetische noordpool zijn van nature behoorlijk grillig en doordat deze de laatste decennia sneller beweegt dan daarvoor, kunnen kleine afwijkingen ten opzichte van de voorspelling vrij snel uitmonden in grote verschillen tussen de voorspellingen en werkelijkheid. Met een nieuw World Magnetic Model kunnen we er naar verwachting echter weer even tegenaan. In ieder geval tot 2020, het jaar waarin het model sowieso ook weer een update zal krijgen.
Voor het eerst een 2,6 km groot object ontdekt aan de rand van ons zonnestelsel
Voor het eerst een 2,6 km groot objectontdekt aan de rand van ons zonnestelsel
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het bestaan van dergelijke objecten werd meer dan 70 jaar geleden al voorspeld.
Maar nu pas zijn onderzoekers erin geslaagd om zo’n object te spotten. Dat is te lezen in het blad Nature Astronomy.
Kuipergordel Het betreffende object bevindt zich in de Kuipergordel, een flinke verzameling kleine hemellichamen die zich voorbij de baan van Neptunus bevindt. Aangenomen wordt dat deze Kuipergordel is opgebouwd uit puin dat na de vorming van het zonnestelsel overbleef. En in tegenstelling tot de kleine hemellichamen – zoals planetoïden – die zich in het binnenste van ons zonnestelsel wagen en aldaar beïnvloed worden door straling, botsingen en de zwaartekracht van de planeten, zijn de objecten in de donkere, afgelegen Kuipergordel vrijwel ongerept gebleven. Ze kunnen – als overgebleven bouwmaterialen van de planeten in ons zonnestelsel – dan ook een goed beeld geven van het planeetvormingsproces.
Missend puzzelstukje Aangenomen wordt dat planeten het levenslicht zien wanneer stof en ijs samenklontert. Gaandeweg ontstaat zo een steeds groter object dat – met zijn toenemende zwaartekracht – steeds meer materiaal naar zich toetrekt. Het eindresultaat van dat proces – planeten zoals onze aarde, maar ook Mars en Venus – hebben we al uitgebreid kunnen bestuderen. Maar het object dat onderzoekers nu gevonden hebben, kan gezien worden als een missend puzzelstukje in de evolutie van planeten. Het zit namelijk tussen die eerste samenklontering van stof en ijs en de planeten die we vandaag de dag zien, in.
Een artistieke impressie van het 2,6 kilometer grote object.
Afbeelding: Ko Arimatsu.
Gespot Het bestaan van Kuipergordelobjecten met een straal van één tot enkele kilometers werd meer dan 70 jaar geleden al voorspeld. Maar het daadwerkelijk waarnemen ervan is lastig gebleken. Zelfs de beste telescopen kunnen de kleine objecten die op zo’n grote afstand staan en zo weinig licht reflecteren niet direct waarnemen. Japanse onderzoekers besloten het daarom over een andere boeg te gooien. Ze plaatsten twee kleine telescopen op het dak van een Japanse school en monitorden 2000 sterren, in de hoop dat de helderheid van één van deze sterren af zou nemen doordat een Kuipergordelobject van hooguit enkele kilometers groot er voor langs zou bewegen. Een analyse van de data wijst uit dat de helderheid van één van de sterren inderdaad afnam en wel zodanig dat alles erop wijst dat een 2,6 kilometer groot Kuipergordelobject voor de ster langsbewoog.
Talrijk Dat de onderzoekers bij de eerste poging al een Kuipergordelobject van deze omvang vinden, suggereert dat dergelijke objecten behoorlijk talrijk zijn. Het onderschrijft de theorie dat ijs en stof langzaam samenklitte tot objecten van hooguit enkele kilometers groot alvorens een groeispurt door te maken door met vergelijkbare objecten samen te smelten.
De ontdekking smaakt natuurlijk naar meer. De onderzoekers zijn dan ook voornemens om de Kuipergordel opnieuw onder de loep te nemen. Ook zouden ze graag nog eens onderzoek doen naar de nog verder gelegen Oortwolk, die is opgebouwd uit miljarden komeetachtige objecten.
Antarctica hasn’t been doing so well lately. The continent is rapidly melting, and a large chunk of the snow and ice is only held back from the ocean by an array of glaciers and ice shelves guarding the coasts.None of these are doing well, but one of them—the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica—is rapidly crumbling. Now scientists have learned why it’s collapsing so quickly: There’s agiant underground cavern in the glacier almost as big as Manhattan.
The data comes from NASA’s Operation IceBridge, a program that flies radar-equipped planes over the poles to map out glaciers and ice sheets in three dimensions. These radar images are even capable of seeing through the ice to get a clear model of the glacier down to the bedrock. This information is extremely useful to scientists because how quickly a glacier melts depends a great deal on what’s going on near that bedrock.
In Thwaites’ case, that radar uncovered a gigantic cavern between the glacier itself and the bedrock below it. That cavern is likely filled with air much warmer than the surrounding ice, triggering faster melting of the glacier than would happen otherwise. Thanks to this nearly-Manhattan-sized gap in the ice, the entire glacier along with the surrounding ice sheet will likely disappear much more quickly.
A radar image of Thwaites from 2011 to 2017. The cavern is visible as the growing red blob in the center of the image. The noisy red and blue part in the bottom corner comes from ice breaking off into the sea.
NASA/JPL-CALTECH
So what happens if Thwaites melts? Immediately, we'd get about 2 feet of sea level rise. But the real danger is what happens after. Thwaites holds back a large portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and a handful of nearby glaciers; if Thwaites disappears, we could see an additional 8 feet of sea level rise from these sources, on top of the 2 feet from Thwaites itself.
Even more worrying to scientists beyond just the cavern existing is how quickly it appeared. The cavern first appeared in 2012 and most of the ice that once occupied it melted in the last 3. Most models of the Thwaites glacier don’t take into account rapid cavern forming, so the entire glacier is likely to be melting much faster than our predictions estimate.
In other words, there’s a good chance we could be looking at some serious melting in the near future, thanks to this glacier and the ice around it.
A fast-moving comet, C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto), is nearing its February encounter with the sun and Earth. It’ll pass near some galaxies as seen from Earth, providing a great opportunity for astrophotographers. Charts and more info here.
Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) is seen at the bottom of this beautiful image by Rolando Ligustri. Used with permission.
A new celestial visitor – a comet – wasdiscoveredby Japanese astronomer Masayuki Iwamoto in late 2018. It’ll provide nice opportunities for astrophotographers, as it will pass close to a couple of Messier objects in February 2019. It’s a fast-moving comet that will be closest to Earth on February 12, 2019, at around 2:57 p.m. ET (19:57 UTC;translate to your time zone). The celestial visitor will safely pass by Earth at some 28 million miles (45 million km). The comet has been designated C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto).
This comet is fast! Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) is traveling through space at the amazing speed of 147,948 miles per hour (238,099 km/h) or 66 km per second, relative to Earth.
The best nights for observing the comet (with binoculars and small telescopes) should be on February 11 and 12. Preliminary estimates suggest the newly found comet might reach a brightness or magnitude between 7 and 7.8 , which means it should be easily seen with small telescopes and binoculars. It will not be visible to the eye alone.
A closer look at comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto)’s orbit.
Image via NASA/JPL.
During closest approach to Earth, comet Iwamoto will be located in front of the constellation Leo the Lion, which is visible late at night at this time of year.
Astrophotographers might be able to capture this comet passing close to some galaxies, as seen from our perspective. See the illustrations below:
Late on the night of Saturday, February 2, 2019, Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) passes close to M104 (Sombrero Galaxy), providing a nice opportunity to astrophotographers.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On February 2, 2019, comet Iwamoto passes close to Messier 104 (Sombrero Galaxy), while by February 10, 2019, the celestial visitor will appear passing very close to Messier 95, a galaxy in the constellation Leo.
Facing east on February 10, 2019 at around 10 p.m. CT as seen from the central US. Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) will pass close to some galaxies in Leo, especially Messier 95.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) from February 10 to 12, 2019. Binoculars should provide a nice view of the fuzzy patch of light, while telescopes might allow seeing a hint of a green color. Facing east at 10 p.m. CT as seen from central U.S.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
The comet was detected in images taken on December 18, 2018.
Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) looks great in this image taken on January 17, 2019, by Rolando Ligustri.
We will keep you updated …
The orbit of comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) is very elliptical (elongated). Its orbit suggests this comet came from the Oort cloud of comets surrounding our solar system.
Bottom line: A new comet soon to be within reach of binoculars and small telescopes is heading toward a February 2019 encounter with the sun and Earth. It’ll pass Earth safely on February 11-12.
Spooky ancient sculptures of ‘aliens and spaceships’ in Mexican cave spark claims extraterrestrials have lived on Earth
Spooky ancient sculptures of ‘aliens and spaceships’ in Mexican cave spark claims extraterrestrials have lived on Earth
ANCIENT sculptures depicting alien-like figures have been found in a cave in Mexico, it has been claimed.
The spooky artefacts which reportedly date back thousands of years show creatures with long faces and wide eyes.
ANCIENT sculptures depicting alien-like figures have been found in a cave in Mexico, it has been claimed.
The spooky artefacts which reportedly date back thousands of years show creatures with long faces and wide eyes.
A sculptor reportedly found in a Mexican cave appears to show an alien mother and her children
Other sculptures appear to show spaceships flying through the air.
The mystery objects are reportedly popular among locals who live near the caves in an unspecified area of Mexico, reports The Daily Star.
The clip showing the eerie pictures was uploaded to YouTube channel UFOmania yesterday and has already been viewed thousands of times.
Despite the channel not providing any background detail to when and where the sculptures were found, many online users appeared convinced by the clip.
A stone features drawing which resemble spacecrafts
Many of the artefacts depict long faces with oval-shaped eyes
The supposedly ancient sculptures have sparked claims that aliens visited earth thousands of years ago
A reportedly ancient sculptor appears to show a humanoid holding a bowl
One wrote: “Incredible evidentiary support of the fact that extraterrestrials have been engaging the human race for a very long time!”
Another said: “Best evidence yet !!!”
While others are were not so easily convinced.
One sceptical YouTuber user wrote: “If it looks too good to be true, it's probably not.”
The grainy black and white snap first appeared in a book by the Italian consul Alberto Perego in 1958 but have never been seen outside of Italy
Dr Roberto Pinotti, 72, said the otherworldly visitor, who wore dark shades to cover his eyes, let two of them on board his flying saucer.
The strange encounter allegedly happened in Francavillia, on the Adriatic Coast, in October 1957.
Dr Pinotti said a group of residents were regularly visited by human-like extraterrestrials who wanted to be "friends" with mankind - just like ET in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounter movie.
Un OVNI incroyable a été filmé à Greensboro, en Caroline du Nord
Un OVNI incroyable a été filmé à Greensboro, en Caroline du Nord
Un OVNI, qui émettait des flashs lumineux aléatoirement, a été filmé dans le ciel à l’extérieur de la ville de Greensboro, dans l’État de Caroline du Nord. Ces images ont déclenché de vifs débats sur les réseaux sociaux. Certaines personnes ont même affirmé avoir vu ce même objet mystérieux.
Cette vidéo, d’une durée de 5 minutes, nous montre un objet « en forme de pastille » planer dans le ciel et produire une série de flashs. L’homme, derrière la caméra, prend soin d’agrandir et de mettre en valeur cet incroyable engin.
La vidéo a été postée le samedi 26 janvier 2019. Elle a été visionnée des milliers de fois depuis sa diffusion sur diverses chaînes YouTube consacrées aux OVNI et aux mystères non résolus, dont The Hidden Underbelly 2.0.
Ces images ont été prises par Bret Jones, connu sous le nom de SpaceBret sur YouTube. Il explique dans la vidéo que cette « chose étrange » a été repérée le vendredi 25 janvier alors qu’il tentait de filmer des oiseaux en dehors de Greensboro.
« J’ai remarqué une étrange lumière clignotante dans le ciel près d’un avion. Elle se déplaçait lentement dans le ciel, un peu plus lentement que les avions qui volaient », explique Jones sur YouTube. « Je ne pensais pas l’avoir filmé du tout, car je ne parvenais pas à faire le focus avec mon objectif, ni à le verrouiller. »
Cependant, il dit qu’il a ensuite grossi la vidéo à 900% et l’a passé au ralentie. Cela a révélé un objet « en forme de pilule » qui produit des éclairs lumineux à partir de ses deux extrémités.
« Quand je l’ai vu, ça m’a complètement bouleversé parce que ce n’était pas du tout ce à quoi je m’attendais », déclare Jones sur YouTube. « Je ne sais pas ce que c’est. »
Une personne a suggéré que ce n’était rien de plus qu’un « ballon Mylar avec une ficelle ou un ballon avec une antenne d’extension WiFi ». Dans une partie de la vidéo, il semble que cet objet possède une attache.
Cependant, Jones affirme que cela n’expliquerait pas le clignotement et la disparition soudaine de l’objet. Le lien suspecté pourrait également être l’objet qui « éjectait une sorte de carburant ».
D’autres semblent être d’accord avec cette dernière théorie. Un internaute a, en effet, noté que cela semble « sortir puis se rétracter ». Plusieurs personnes ont déclaré avoir vu la même chose et avoir eu du mal à la filmer.
« J’ai vu un objet similaire à Winston Salem le 25, en fin d’après-midi ! », A commenté Julia Hejnar sur YouTube. « C’est arrivé si vite. Il clignotait comme ça ! »
« Je vois régulièrement ce flash la nuit depuis un an maintenant », a commenté SkyHound.
« Je… connais bien la différence entre les avions, les satellites, les torches à iridium, les météorites, les hélicoptères, etc. Ceci est différent… Il semble émettre des flashs extrêmement lumineux, sans motif. Il disparaît même parfois dans un feu rouge terne. »
La Caroline du Nord a été le théâtre de nombreuses observations d’OVNI ces dernières décennies. Certains cas ont été expliqués. Parfois, il s’agissait de dirigeables ou d’avions militaires.
"Out There," Space.com senior writer Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life (among other things), comes out Nov. 13, 2018.
Credit: Grand Central Publishing
In "OUT THERE: A Scientific Guide to Alien Life, Antimatter, and Human Space Travel (for the Cosmically Curious)," (Grand Central Publishing, 2018), Space.com senior writer Mike Wall tackles the most pressing questions about alien life. For example, how are scientists searching for ET? What might aliens look like, would they want to kill us, and are they likely to have sex? The book, which comes out Nov. 13 and was illustrated by Karl Tate, also talks about humanity's quest to get off its natal rock and spread out into the solar system. You can read an excerpt below.
Chapter 1: Where Is Everybody?
In 1950, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi — who led the team that created the first-ever nuclear reactor, the inadequately named Chicago Pile-1 — and a few of his colleagues were discussing UFOs during their lunch break. The conversation prompted Fermi to ask his companions, "Where is everybody?" [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
Fermi meant that the lack of visits by ET is distinctly odd. The Milky Way harbors hundreds of billions of stars and is about 13 billion years old, so there has been plenty of time and opportunity for alien civilizations to rise and spread throughout the galaxy. By some estimates, a colonization-minded species with propulsion technology not much more advanced than our own could island-hop its way to every corner of the Milky Way in just a few million years.
The physicist's simple question is enshrined now as Fermi's paradox — one of the two coolest paradoxes of all time, along with the crocodile paradox — and it continues to puzzle scientists to this day. Indeed, the mystery has deepened considerably over the years. For one thing, we're not just talking about the lack of visitation anymore. In 1960, 6 years after Fermi's death, astronomer Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at West Virginia's Green Bank Observatory at the nearby sun-like stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, kicking off the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).Nearly 60 years later, SETI scientists are still hunting for the first confirmed peep from ET.
Then there's the exoplanet revolution. Alien worlds were purely hypothetical objects in Fermi's day and for decades afterward; scientists didn't announce the first confirmed detection of a planet beyond the solar system until 1992. But in the last decade or so, NASA's Kepler space telescope and other instruments have revealed that the cosmos is teeming with possibly life-supporting worlds. Kepler's discoveries suggest that about 20 percent of the Milky Way's sun-like stars host an Earth-sized world in the "habitable zone" — that just-right range of orbital distances that would allow you to walk around in flip-flops pretty much year-round. The proportion appears to be similar for red dwarfs, the small, dim stars that dominate our galaxy. (About 75 percent of Milky Way stars are red dwarfs, whereas just 10 percent or so are similar to our sun.)
"There's a lot of real estate out there, and we now know that," said radio astronomer Jill Tarter, who co-founded the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and served as the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the lead character in Carl Sagan's novel Contact and the movie based on it.
Not all of this real estate is way out in the boonies, either. The sun's nearest neighbor, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, hosts an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone. Seven rocky planets circle the dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, which isn't much farther away from us in the cosmic scheme of things — and three of those worlds may be able to support life as we know it. (Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1 lie about 4.2 light-years and 39 light-years from Earth, respectively. The entire Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years wide.) [The 7 Earth-Sized Planets of TRAPPIST-1 in Pictures]
So, again: where is everybody? Nobody knows. The Fermi paradox is tougher than a Brazil nut, and scientists haven't cracked it yet. But it's not for lack of trying. They've advanced hundreds of hypotheses to explain it. As varied as these ideas are, they all encompass just a few basic possibilities, as physicist Stephen Webb noted in his book If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens, Where Is Everybody? Let's take a look at each of these three explanation families.
Possibility 1: What paradox? Intelligent aliens have already messed with us
You may already have wandered off, irritated or incensed that I put the Fermi paradox on equal footing with the beloved crocodile paradox. Perhaps you're now thumbing through a dog-eared copy of Chariots of the Gods? or watching YouTube clips of that "alien autopsy" TV special that Fox aired in the 1990s.
Indeed, one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox is that it's no paradox at all, because ET has already journeyed to Earth. Adherents of this explanation often point to UFO sightings and alien abduction stories, topics that you can read about in chapter 10. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that scientists generally don't regard any of these reports as convincing evidence of alien life. (If they did, you definitely would have heard about it.)
There are more subtle possibilities in play as well. For example, what if ET came to our planet long ago, before people were around to be probed? Unless the voyaging aliens were particularly interested in us, this is much more likely than a documented visit, given that our species has existed for just the last 200,000 years of Earth's 4.5-billion-year history and has been capable of capturing encounters on blurry, low-light video for only a few decades.
Let's indulge in some wild speculation, because it's fun! Say Earth has been colonized many times over the eons by greedy, grabby alien civilizations, each of which ground the planet's native species into the dust in the process. (Don't get too high and mighty: pioneering humans have tended to wreak ecological havoc as we've explored the globe.) As astrophysicist and sci-fi author David Brin has pointed out, a history of such oppression could explain why it took intelligent life so long to arise on our planet as well as the radio silence in our galactic neighborhood. Maybe Earth is the only planet for light-years around to have recovered from the ravages of invasion.
If you squint a little, this scenario lines up with the five mass extinctions that scientists have identified in the fossil record. These great purges occurred about 450 million years ago, 375 million years ago, 251 million years ago, 200 million years ago, and, most famously, 66 million years ago, when an asteroid strike wiped out three-quarters of all Earth's species, including the dinosaurs. "It may not be preposterous," Brin wrote in a seminal 1983 paper, to compare the intervals between these extinction events and the time it might take for different waves of invasion to wash over Earth. The dino-killing asteroid could even have been a weapon of war, slung by a space-dwelling alien faction with a beef against their brethren on Earth.
Brin didn't mean to suggest that any of this actually happened, and neither do I. There's no evidence that it did — no spacecraft entombed in ancient amber, no ruins of a 200-million-year-old city — and I certainly wouldn't put any money on it. But it's possible. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]
Credit: Karl Tate/Grand Central Publishing
Possibility 2: They're out there, but we haven't found them yet
As scientists and other logically minded people often point out, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It's entirely possible that intelligent aliens are (or were) out there, and we just haven't spotted any signs of them yet.
For example, maybe ET hasn't visited Earth because getting here is just too hard. The distances involved in any interstellar trek are mind-boggling. Proxima Centauri is "just" 4.2 light-years from the sun. But that's almost 25 trillion miles — equivalent to circling Earth 1 billion times, going to Pluto and back 3,450 times, or jogging around the track at your local high school 100 trillion times. It would take a spacecraft about 75,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri using today's rockets.
There aren't enough honey-roasted peanuts and Sudoku books on Earth to make that trip bearable. Even if we assume that aliens, with their pulsating and extravagantly veined brains, have developed super-fast propulsion tech that puts our puny human gear to shame, there's still a big problem: energy. Say the aliens, like Starfleet engineers, know how to build matter-antimatter engines that can accelerate a ship to 75 percent the speed of light. Just making an Earth-Proxima Centauri round trip with this craft would require 100,000 times more energy than the United States uses in an entire year, physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote in his book The Physics of Star Trek. Is the aliens' desire to probe us, or to give the ancient Egyptians some killer pyramid blueprints, really that strong?
Or maybe ET just doesn't want to interfere with the development of life on other worlds — and has hewed to this noble "prime directive" far more successfully than Captain Kirk and his crew have managed to do in the Star Trek universe. (Remember when the Enterprise gang took it upon themselves to destroy the machine-god Vaal in an original series episode? Vaal seemed like a jerk, but still.) It's even possible that aliens are watching us right now, to monitor our technological progress, figure out how we tick, or keep their bratty kids occupied for a few hours.
Some thinkers take such reasoning a step further, suggesting that we and everything else in the observable universe — yes, even love — may be part of a simulation run on a very fancy alien computer. Before laughing this off, consider how much cooler Fortniteis than Burger Time. Those two games were released just 35 years apart, and the hypothetical aliens have had billions of years to come up with amazing graphics and compelling yet believable storylines. Indeed, philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that the odds we're trapped in a Matrix-style pseudo-existence are actually quite high — provided there are a decent number of super-advanced civilizations out there and at least some of them are keen to create convincing virtual worlds, for fun or profit. Given these two assumptions, the number of artificially created universes, or patches of universe, will far outstrip the number of real ones, according to this line of thinking.
Along similar lines, perhaps ET's technical mastery has driven its focus away from the real world and into the virtual, sapping its desire to explore the cosmos or meet any potential neighbors. (Humanity may well succumb to this fate when high-quality virtual reality porn hits the marketplace.)
There are other reasons why advanced aliens may be keeping their heads down as well. Self-preservation springs to mind: what if they're trying to avoid being destroyed or enslaved by big-time cosmic jerks, like the Borg from Star Trek or the Galactic Empire in Star Wars? Scientists have even suggested that evil aliens may have sent fleets of intelligent, self-replicating "berserker" probes out into the galaxy to hunt for radio transmissions and other signs of intelligent life — and to exterminate any civilizations they find. [The Evolution of 'Star Trek' (Infographic)]
Extinction is another possibility. Maybe those berserkers have done a lot of exterminating over the eons. Or perhaps alien civilizations tend to off themselves in relatively short order. Humanity has come perilously close to a nuclear holocaust several times, after all, and we've recently spurred a global mass extinction that may end up claiming our species as well. And yet, with all that, we've been capable of sending signals to other stars for only a century or so.
If a 100-year messaging life span is the norm for civilizations, "then it's as if there are two fireflies that each flick on once during the course of a long night," said Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to astrobiology and SETI research. (METI stands for messaging extraterrestrial intelligence — the controversial notion that humanity should reach out to potential alien civilizations, rather than just passively listen.)
The odds that these cosmic fireflies will flash at the same time are, of course, not good. That's sad for them, and sad for any giant space monsters that want to catch them and put them in jars.
It's also possible that ET is trying to get our attention, and we just haven't noticed yet. After all, humanity has been searching for alien transmissions for less than 60 years — the last 0.000001 percent of Earth's history — and always on a shoestring budget.
How shoestring? Well, the US government hasn't bankrolled a SETI operation for a quarter-century. NASA began an ambitious observing project in 1992 but had to stop a year later when Congress cut off the money. (The leader of the defunding push, Nevada senator Richard Bryan, painted the SETI effort as a Mars safari for some reason. "The Great Martian Chase may finally come to an end," Bryan said in 1993. "As of today, millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green fellow. Not a single Martian has said, ‘Take me to your leader,' and not a single flying saucer has applied for FAA approval.")
The SETI Institute and other such groups generally rely on private donations to keep the lights on and the telescopes listening. These donations don't always come through. The SETI Institute had to idle its main ear to the universe, the forty-two-dish Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, for four months in 2011, and the original plan called for the ATA to consist of 350 telescopes, but there hasn't been enough cash to complete the build.
Given this situation and the huge scale of the Milky Way galaxy, scientists have not yet been able to mount a comprehensive SETI survey. They haven't even come close.
Tarter often relies on an analogy to get this point across: imagine that you're searching for fish across the entirety of Earth's oceans, and you wade into the surf and scoop up a single glass of seawater. "If you did that experiment and your glass didn't contain a fish, you probably would not conclude that there aren't any fish," Tarter said. "Well, numerically, the amount of searching that we've done versus the amount that we might have to do is equivalent to that one glass of ocean."
We may not even be looking for the right kinds of signals. The SETI search to date has focused heavily on radio waves and to a lesser extent laser-light pulses, because those are technologies that humanity has mastered. But we're already weaning ourselves off radio-wave transmission just a century after inventing it; when's the last time you sharpened your TV's picture by crumpling some tinfoil onto rabbit ears? Would a billion-year-old alien civilization really still be communicating like this, or in any way we could understand? Maybe ET sends messages via neutrinos, the bizarre and unfathomably numerous particles that zoom through planets unimpeded like subatomic Houdinis. (Trillions of solar neutrinos passed through your body in the time it took to read that last sentence.) Maybe the aliens are telepathic. Who knows?
Our current strategy may be akin to trying to eavesdrop on people via walkie-talkie, according to astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, who's a professor at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany and an adjunct professor at Arizona State University and Washington State University.
"You probably won't get anything, because everyone is on Facebook," Schulze-Makuch said.
As this discussion shows, many of the ideas bandied about to explain Fermi's paradox basically amount to ET psychology. And that's not the most promising path for a breakthrough: getting inside the heads of super-advanced aliens is beyond us, at least until we stop devoting most of our creative energies to meme generation. (Thank you for indulging this "get off my lawn" moment.)
Credit: Karl Tate/Grand Central Publishing
Possibility 3: We are alone
The last alternative is the most depressing: the cosmic silence speaks volumes.
Maybe Earth is the only inhabited world in the entire galaxy. God loves us that much! Or, if you want to get all science-y about it, the jump from complex organic chemicals to wriggling microbe may be so improbable that it occurred just once, and we hit the jackpot.
This could be a stretch, given how quickly life got a foothold on Earth. Microbes were here by at least 3.8 billion years ago, and perhaps even earlier; some evidence pushes life's emergence back to 4.1 billion years ago, pretty much as soon as Earth had cooled down enough to be habitable. But even if microbes are common throughout the cosmos, intelligent life could still be vanishingly rare. (Astronomers and astrobiologists do actually crack the obligatory joke from time to time: "Hey, we're still searching for intelligent life on Earth!" or "You won't find it on Capitol Hill!") Why? Well, maybe not many planets can offer the long-term TLC required for complexity and smarts to evolve. For example, Earth boasts a large moon that stabilizes its tilt (and thus its climate), and it enjoys the protection of a giant outer planet (Jupiter) whose powerful gravity nudges some dangerous comets away. Perhaps such characteristics are rare for rocky worlds in the habitable zone.
Also, forget what those cartoons showing apes marching toward a proud, pants-wearing future may suggest; there's no "arrow of progress" inherent in evolution. Natural selection favors whatever works, so if simple is successful, simple stays simple. Indeed, that was the story for most of Earth's history. Multicellular organisms don't show up in the fossil record until nearly 600 million years ago — meaning single-celled microbes had the planet to themselves for at least 3 billion years. And there was another long gap before super-smart animals — modern humans — came along.
So it might take a really special set of circumstances to jolt life out of its simple, slimy origins and eventually reach the point where it can invent radio transmitters, spaceships, wheely shoes, and other cool stuff. After all, Earth might still have reptilian overlords if not for that asteroid strike 66 million years ago, which allowed our mammalian ancestors to scurry out from the shadows. [Images: Potentially Dangerous Asteroids]
There are some other important things to keep in mind as well. For example, not all intelligence is the same, as the diversity of life on Earth clearly shows. Chimps, ravens, dolphins, sea otters, octopi, and a number of other species are smart enough to use tools, but only humans have built radio transmitters, spaceships, and wheely shoes. (As far as we know. But if chimps had wheely shoes, you'd think Jane Goodall would've said something.) We can't assume that every intelligent alien species would be technologically smart or able to communicate with us.
The circumstances of their birth may cut many smart aliens off from the rest of the universe. If our own solar system is any guide, the most common life-supporting worlds in the galaxy may be frigid moons and planets with liquid-water oceans beneath their icy shells — places like Saturn's moon Enceladus and the Jupiter satellite Europa. If complex, intelligent life has evolved in such environments — and that's far from a sure thing, given the likely dearth of energy in those dark depths — we might never hear from it.
"How long would it take sentient beings, confined to their pitch-dark liquid habitat by a solid sky hundreds of kilometers thick, to discover that there was a vast universe beyond their world's apparently impenetrable roof?" theoretical physicist Paul Davies wrote in The Eerie Silence, his 2010 book about the Fermi paradox. "It is hard to imagine that they would ever ‘break out' of their ice prison and beam radio messages across space."
Getting an answer
You've made it through the Fermi Paradox Hypothesis Sampler Platter! Did any of the ideas jump out at you? Perhaps the berserkers, for violence and action, or the buried-ocean dwellers, for poignancy? (I picture sallow, eyeless mercreatures sadly strumming lutes.) If so, that's nice, but you probably shouldn't get too attached. We just don't have enough information at the moment to know what's actually going on.
"I find it silly that so many people leap to shout, ‘Aha! I know the answer!'" Brin said. "All we can do is catalog them for now, and maybe rank a ‘Top Ten.'"
But we could start getting at that answer, and soon. Say scientists discover a "second genesis" of microbes — tiny organisms completely unrelated to any kind of life as we know it — on Mars, Enceladus, or another solar system body. We would then know that life is not a super-lucky one-off affair, and we'd strongly suspect that it's widespread throughout the galaxy. This news, combined with a continued SETI silence, would also be troubling for anyone who cares about humanity's future, for it would suggest that the bottleneck limiting the number of intelligent civilizations still lies ahead of us. (There could be a benefit, though: if we think we're the only technologically smart creatures in the galaxy, the resulting sense of responsibility may provide the nudge we need not to destroy ourselves.)
By the same reasoning, getting even a single SETI ping would be a real pick-me-up.
"The detection of a signal—even a cosmic dial tone, with no information — goes on to tell us that we can have a long future," Tarter said. "If somebody else made it through, we can, too."
David Wilcock: Everything You Need to Know About Aliens and UFOs (Video)
David Wilcock: Everything You Need to Know About Aliens and UFOs (Video)
Art By Graham Ganson
David Wilcock and Emery Smith will expand on his experiences underground in one of the worlds best kept secrets.
Emery also disclosed the fact that beings, be they biological, robotic, or a mix of the two do have the ability shape-shift to other forms.
Emery is bringing forward other scientists who have worked on similar projects. There are a lot of people out there or insiders who are older than Emery.
Emery led a lonely life, not being able to get this information out to the public. David Wilcock’s code name for Emery was Paul, before Emery came out in public. If not for David, Emery wouldn’t have come forward.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Linda Moulton Howe: Extraterrestrials Are Likely Someone Else's Machines via Artificial Intelligence (Video)
Linda Moulton Howe: Extraterrestrials Are Likely Someone Else's Machines via Artificial Intelligence (Video)
Linda Moulton Howe starts off with Elon Musk’s comments to American governors at a meeting in Rhode Island: “Artificial Intelligence is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization and I don’t think people really appreciate that.” With video and images, Linda will lay out the emerging problems of applying A. I. to robots, especially those under development for military applications with weapons, and those problems include the potential for robots to lethally turn on their human makers.
As humanity is rapidly moving to depend on A. I. robot support, people in the UFO/E.T. abduction syndrome have been saying for decades that some of the beings they have dealt with were clearly Someone else’s programmed androids and robots.
COAST TO COAST AM. George Knapp welcomed abductee Niara Isley as she recounted her experience which began after she witnessed a mysterious craft at the military’s secretive Tonopah Test Range in Nevada.
She explained that, soon after being sent to the base to train pilots on how to avoid being detected by radar, she spotted a UFO in the sky, which she thought might be a back-engineered US test craft.
Strangely, she noted that there were armed guards standing nearby and their intent seemed to be to ensure that Isley and her colleagues saw the UFO.
The group was then herded onto an old school bus with blacked-out windows, and they were taken to a medical facility.
At a later date, she said, her superiors forced her to board a craft, which was manned by both a grey and reptilian alien, and she was actually taken to the moon.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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