UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

It’s no secret that asteroids may often contain significant quantities of precious metals. In fact, by some measures, it’s reasonable to conclude that much of Earth’s private stock of valuable metals–especially tungsten–actually came from past impacts where space objects collided with the Earth. Hence, many conclude that the future business prospects of mining asteroids in space for their valuable metallic stock are promising.

That is if the next asteroid that collides with Earth doesn’t destroy all life as we know it first.

While this statement may sound alarmist, it is a very legitimate concern, and one that must be dealt with for two primary reasons:

1) such impacts have occurred in the past, and will inevitably occur again, and
2) some past impact events have caused widespread devastation, and even mass extinctions.

However, direct impacts aren’t even necessary for there to be widespread devastation. Despite this, it could be argued that the most alarming thing about asteroids and their potential dangers is that humanity is still massively under-equipped for dealing with such a threat.

The Guardian recently reported on a meteor airburst over the Bering Sea which occurred in late 2018, which went largely unnoticed due to its remote location. Despite this, the meteor unleashed an estimated 10 times as much energy as the atomic blasts that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

“The fireball tore across the sky off Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula on 18 December,” The Guardian reports, “and released energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT. It was the largest air blast since another meteor hurtled into the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, in Russia’s south-west, six years ago, and the second largest in the past 30 years.”

At the time of the Chelyabinsk event, NASA and other space agencies had been observing the passing of another space object near Earth, an asteroid called 2012 DA14, which flew as near as 28,000 km from Earth as it passed. Most evidence points to the two events being unrelated (although it is worth noting that one aerospace expert who I spoke with on conditions of anonymity at the time told me he found it hard to believe that the two events were entirely unrelated).

Whether or not the events were related, many raised the question as to why, if one object was already being tracked by NASA, there had been no advance warning of the Chelyabinsk meteor. Writing for Skeptical Inquirer in 2013, David Morrison, Alan Harris, and Mark Boslough noted that, “With a diameter of [about] twenty meters… the Chelyabinsk impactor was smaller than most asteroids that have been detected by the telescopes of the NASA Spaceguard Survey, which focuses on finding asteroids of about one hundred meters or larger.”

Of course, it wouldn’t necessarily require a space object 100 meters or larger to cause widespread devastation. Perhaps the best evidence for this is the famous Tunguska incident of 1908, which involved an object that was estimated to have been a mere 120 feet across, and which managed to destroy 800 square miles of forest in remote Siberia, flattening 80 million trees, according to data from NASA.

As noted at the space agency’s website:

“It is estimated the asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour. During its quick plunge, the 220-million-pound space rock heated the air surrounding it to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit. At 7:17 a.m. (local Siberia time), at a height of about 28,000 feet, the combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to fragment and annihilate itself, producing a fireball and releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs.”

Flattened trees visible in the aftermath of the Tunguska event.

Along with the fact that asteroids smaller than those in the range of easy detection can be devastating is the fact that they can’t easily be destroyed. Charles El Mir, Ph.D of Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering described the problem in a recent paper, where he and his colleagues found that previous computer models used to determine how easily an asteroid would break were outdated. By employing a new computer model known as a Tonge-Ramesh model (named in part for one of his colleagues, K.T. Ramesh, who is director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute), the group succeeded in calculating more detailed processes which determine what happens when an asteroid collides with another object.

“We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws,” El Mir wrote. “Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered.”

Not that anyone ever said that it would be easy to destroy a potentially deadly asteroid, of course, although knowing just how resilient they can be isn’t very comforting. Fortunately, what is comforting is that of the detectable asteroid threats presently known to NASA, none pose any direct dangers to Earth within the next century.

So at very least, we may have some time to work on these problems before any Armageddon-style events become an imminent threat. Nonetheless, the evidence shows that even smaller asteroids–whether or not they ever collide directly with Earth–can also be problematic. The time to act is now if we hope to develop reliable methods of detecting and intercepting asteroids and other space objects that may pose a danger to the future of humankind.

Despite all the reasons why it’s a truly terrible idea, humanity still seems desperate to actively seek out alien life. NASA recently created a new department dedicated to searching for alien life, and one of the increasingly popular avenues for this search is looking for “technosignatures,” the distinctly artificial byproducts of advanced civilization. One of those technosignatures is the spaceships the aliens are cruising around in, or more accurately, the radiation emanating from the engine of the galactic hot-rod. A new paper from Dr. Louis Crane, a mathematician at Kansas State University, argues that the most likely interstellar engines are powered by artificial black holes, the gamma-ray radiation signatures of which we’d be able to see. In fact, Crane says, we may have already detected them.

Black hole spaceships, if possible at all, would require a civilization that was already at Type II on the Kardashev scale, which would mean they had achieved total mastery over the energy output of their entire solar system. Why would they need to be that advanced? Because making a black hole is one of the harder things a civilization could accomplish. In an email exchange with Universe Today, Dr. Louis Crane wrote:

“To produce an artificial black hole we would need to focus a billion ton gamma ray laser to nuclear dimensions. It’s like making as many high tech nuclear bombs as there are automobiles on Earth. Just the scale of it is beyond the current world economy. A civilization which fully utilized the Solar System would have the resources.”

In her recent paper, titled Searching for Extraterrestrial Civilizations Using Gamma Ray Telescopes, Dr. Crane acknowledges that black hole spaceships would be far out of reach for any civilization at the development level of humanity, and that it is impossible to say for certain whether an advanced civilization could ever solve the problems necessary to build a black hole spaceship. However, Crane says that a black hole engine may be the only means of interstellar travel capable of powering a ship that could shield its inhabitants from the many hazards of space travel. She writes:

Only with a much denser power source than anything yet tried would it be possible to shield a habitat from the radiation of space and accelerate it continuously to provide a livable human environment. A black hole can convert matter into energy, so it would be the ultimate power source. An artificial black hole, although extremely difficult to produce or control, would open possibilities that nothing we can currently conceive would equal. We think that it should be investigated as far as it can be.

In terms of investigating, Dr. Crane says that we could use gamma ray telescopes to detect the radiation from black hole spaceships. The ships would, she says, produce a very distinct pattern gamma radiation that would be easily distinguishable from natural phenomena.

Interestingly, she says that we have detected mysterious points of unexplained gamma radiation coming from the galactic center—an area likely to house potential civilizations due to the extremely high density of stars. These mysterious gamma ray emissions are puzzling due to their lack of associated X rays and the intensity of their energy output, which, so far, no known phenomena can explain. Dr. Crane suggests that these points of gamma rays be observed over the following decades to see if they begin to show the distinctive patterns predicted with black hole spaceships.

We’d be barely able to recognize a Type II civilization.

And what then? If we found evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations that are using black holes to power their ships, while we’re still lighting stuff on fire to spin turbines, we better hope they don’t notice us looking at them. Contact with such a species probably wouldn’t result in a good time. On the other hand, just knowing that such technology was possible, and that we’re not alone out here, could be the impetus for us to focus on claiming our destiny among the stars. Or we’d hurl a couple nukes at them, just to show them who’s boss, and that, as they say, would be that.